While working at Rare Method our team invested a lot of effort into designing and developing this great interactive Flash and HTML/CSS hybrid site. ArtPad was commissioned by the Calgary Glenbow Museum for the purpose of informing and interesting youth in contemporary art. I’m not sure when this site finally went live, but chances are that you have never seen or even heard about it, as I was unable to find a press release or news article anywhere. Take a few minutes to check it out. I think you will enjoy it and maybe learn a thing or two about contemporary art.
http://www.glenbow.org/artpad
I just finished an AIR (Apollo) application that loads and saves data from an external XML file. I figured I would share the code to accomplish this task as there is not a lot of Apollo info around at this time.
First off lets start with loading an XML file and reading its contents. I realize that there are much easier ways to load XML into Flash than this, but the advantage here is that I can use File.applicationResourceDirectory which allows me to target the installation directory for the XML file that was included with the AIR package. In this snippet I am using the synchronous open method. This essentially pauses everything else in the Flash movie until it has completed its task (opening the file).
Read more…
The end of the long anticipated wait for Adobe Creative Suite 3 is almost here. I got my first glimpse of the goodness to come in Las Vegas at Adobe MAX 2006. I expect the differences between Adobe and Macromedia products will finally come to an end as the best of both worlds are merged into one. Of course I’m mainly interested in Flash CS3. I never managed to make it onto the beta testing list and the Flash 9 alpha was Flash 8 with ActionScript 3 support, which was fun to play around with, but boasted no new interface enhancements and other goodies. Friends who did make it onto the beta have told me about some of the new features and I’m pretty stoked to try them out for myself.
The official announcement from the Adobe Creative Solutions PR team.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativesolutionspr/
Fraser 
I thought this day would never come. The soon to be award winning Rolex.com redesign has finally been launched.
Before leaving Critical Mass I spent around three months on the Rolex team helping out on the development side of this site. Although the site appears to be completly Flash to the common user, it supports deep linking and it is search engine friendly. If the user does not have Flash installed it degrades gracefully to an HTML version.
The design is incredible, featuring stunning photographs of scenery from around the world as well as many very gorgeous models, and of course plenty of beautiful watches that most of us will never be able to afford.
Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.
A good friend and colleague of mine Scott Morgan has left us at Critical Mass and has taken a position as the Flash Manager at Yahoo! in sunny California. I’m really going to miss working with him, but I’m also very happy for him. This will be a great experience and I really can’t blame him for not turning it down. Plus, it is freezing up here in Calgary. He just told me he is going to be meeting with Mike Chambers and Ted Patrick later this week and that Yahoo! already has the latest beta (not alpha) of Flash CS3 (Blaze). Scott you lucky bastard!
Congratulations and the best of luck Scott!
P.S. Make sure you say hi to Schiller and Dr. Yes for me.