wow..... the announcement today from Adobe about opening the Flash Player up to the market to be placed on any imaginable device is just stunning. This is going to place even more demand on people with Flash skills as these companies begin to produce handheld devices using the Flash Player.

The only thing in the press release that set off my BS detector was this.. "“The Open Screen Project will make it simple for Verizon and our partners to deliver rich mobile experiences to more devices,”" .. yeah, and how big of a fee will they charge developers before they can develop for the Verizon network?

I also noticed that there was no mention of Apple in that press release.

Mike Chambers posted an update on his blog about the rebuilding-moving-updating of MXNA. I've been getting my fix from fullasagoog for a while since MXNA was beginning to be overwhelming.

Oh.. some random things.. Gregarius, Rubicon .. I've been having some fun with those.

ok, so this shot through the old radar way back (first of October?) and apparently a lot of people had the same reaction I did "..too... busy... will.. deal... with ... later.." because I rediscovered the Adobe AIR Marketplace today and saw that there were 27 apps listed in the Most Recent list. So I looked through those and thought some were cool and clicked on Highest Rated.. same 27 (but different order of course). So I clicked on ALL.. same 27.

I'm interested because I'm just finally getting into AIR and need some examples to show people and the AIR Marketplace has some but I'm finding there are more around. Submit them to the Adobe Marketplace if you've got them.

And if you have no clue what AIR is then go here and/or to the Adobe AIR Marketplace

Way back in the days of Macromedia Central some of the Flash community were requesting some things that at the time we thought were huge..
- the ability to have the apps show up in the Start menu, shortcuts on the desktop, etc like a real app
- the ability to totally skin the app window (remove the Central chrome)
- a lightweight, built in database for handling large amounts of data, extra bonus if it handled SQL
- a way to securely store data on the system on a per user basis
- better performance both in video and in ActionScript
- free (as in beer) like the Flash Player instead of buying licenses for Central

and others.. I can think of these easily though because these are some of the requests that the folks at Macromedia sat down with us and listened to. The result is AIR, and most of those features I listed above are pretty well known features of AIR already. Here Christian Cantrell gives some info on the "how to securely store data" part in AIR. It might seem like a small feature, but it's a big win for some folks. It's certainly possible to roll your own solution, but it's nice to have a standard, built in method.