What a disaster!

Today we have released this small Video Flash game.

One of the keys, technically speaking has been the use of Captionate, a Windows application that embeds two data types into FLV files: Markers, for simple cue points with optional labels and Captions, for captioning / subtitling optionally with multi language tracks and speakers.

Red Bull Air Race Video Challenge

Old but interesting notes of how to to detect a specific user’s download speed with Flash, by Hayden Porter.

I finally gave up the idea of the Eclipse update manager taking care of the upgrade from 3.0.2 to 3.1 as I had previously posted it. It just didn’t do it, although as I understand the settings, it should have…

So I downloaded the new full version. Initially I was worried that it would loose all my settings for plugins etc. but it actually went smoothly!

Here’s what you need to do:

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I found this post about the Monte Hall problem on the Singularity blog and couldn't help but writing a little simulator...

I'm not going into the details again - it's a quite fascinating statistical problem that appeared in a US game show and apparently caused quite some controversy (here's a another good explanation).

I took the opportunity to try out FAME, which worked nicely thanks to the excellent first step tutorial by Carlos Rovira's (Towards Open Source Flash Development).

It might be worth mentioning that the latest version of Flashout only works with Eclipse 3.1.

Sample swf:
[flash]http://www.blog.lessrain.com/wp-content/upload/makeadeal.swf,500,100[/flash]

-> Et voilà - we truly double our chances by switching the door!

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Nothing new here, but I would like to share and remind a few helpful resources that sometimes could help to make your flash movie a little bit more smoother:

• Oddhammer actionScript performance tests.
• Flash kit thread (Optimization Tips).
• List of all the important optimizations in the Flashkit thread.
• Actionscript optimizations tutorial by Marco Lapi.
• Flashm Optimization techniques.
• Watch your speed (EMLlabs).
• Glen Rhodes notes (Flash in the can 2004).
• Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed (in some cases could be applied to ActionScript too).
• Comparison of the available Tween libraries, by Ladislav Zigo. (The benchmark tests how high a framerate can be maintained while tweening 200 MovieClips' width)