Nice, via Read Write Web, Google has released a Flash API for Google Maps in ActionScript 3! Nice to be skipping right over some of those annoying LocalConnection hassles with these APIs when using Flex/AS3.

Speaking of Google, LocalConnection, and APIs, has anyone wrapped up a LocalConnection lib to use the YouTube Chromeless Player APIs yet? I know there is some rough sample code in their forum, but is there a project that puts this all in one spot to use as a library?

What do fried cheese curds, spotted cows, and developing simulations, games, and educational applications in Flex have in common? Madison, WI baby!

If you are interested in working with the educational and academic community in Madison for the University of Wisconsin, and have strong skills and background with client-side development with a focus on Flex and ActionScript, then apply right now!

View the job description and apply!

Issue 82 has finally been closed. We now have new YouTube APIs. What’s really cool is the new Player API, which includes:

• Ability to control playback and access current state of media, and receive notification of important events.
• API accessible from both JavaScript and Flash (ActionScript 2)
• New chromeless player to implement your own controls and skin!

Authentication, uploading and internationalized feeds are also a part of this release!

Update: Watch the video in the announcement post, and you’ll see that Geoff Stearns (OG SWFObject guy) was one of the guys who worked on this. Congrats Geoff!

The Adobe Task Force will collaborate with Adobe on all of the company’s products that output code or content to the Web, and will continue to advocate compliance with Web Standards and accessibility guidelines by those who use Adobe’s products to design and build Web sites and applications.

Blog post

Press Release

Heads up. The last part to the series I’ve written, entitled “Why Mozilla Deserves Our Attention”, is up on InsideRIA now.

In case you missed the first two, here they are.

Geoff Stearns must be really busy, he’s just come up for some air to let us know how 2008 has been going. What fell out of that post as really cool news to me is that he’s working on virtually brand new YouTube video players. These have to rock, and I’m looking forward to them!

Wonder if they’re related to this YouTube Player GData issue on a player API? What, you haven’t seen that issue? Which means you haven’t voted for it, so go there, log-in with your gmail address, and vote for it!!

After logging in just click on the star in the upper left corner next to the issue number to vote for it.

Just a heads up, I’m writing a series of articles dealing with Mozilla and RIAs over on InsideRIA entitled “Why Mozilla Deserves Our Attention”.
Go check it out!

[Update]…and they’re gone, Matt in the comments was right. Didn’t quite have their game together.

Caught this news this morning. A service called Qtrax that allows unlimited, permanently free music downloads that apparently has the support of all the major record labels.

What I see as interesting is the client technology they are using and requiring for use. ReadWriteWeb mentions that it’s built on Songbird.

On the Qtrax site as well, they highlight in multiple spots it’s “A Mozilla Web Browser”, and a “Mozilla Based Browser”.

This is cool as it’s another use of Mozilla technology. Too bad it has so much press and is associating together Songbird, Mozilla, DRM, and Windows-only support not even including iPods. This is in direct opposition of some of the strongest aspects of Mozilla technology.

I’m continuing with my XUL Dark Matter series, which I started with TabPress, a visual editor for simple tabbed content. (Which is at 0.3 now and has theme support)

Now I’ll be looking at Phloneme. Phloneme is a desktop authoring tool as well. It is currently configured to work hand-in-hand with Vocab Collab. Unlike the other XUL projects that I’ve done, Phloneme and Vocab Collab are personal projects that I’ve done in my scant personal free time. I wanted to discipline myself in sticking with something and finishing it through, and this combo was the guinea pig!

(Now, evangelizing a project is a whole different beast and I’m not really pushing that real hard right now with Phloneme and Vocab Collab, but if you know someone interested in the subject domain, pass it along!)

So the whole point of Phloneme (Combination of flow and phoneme), is to write rhymes. It allows you to create, edit, save and publish rhymes directly to Vocab Collab.

The interesting part of the whole thing comes from the ability for the author to easily create structured content, and then push that structure online in the form of a special microformat I’ve created just for rhymes. The structure they add are user-defined rhymes.

The authoring tool allows the user to designate rhyming words in a highly visual way. This is all edited and kept track of through microformat style overloaded class attributes. The document format is XHTML. The editing is taken care of via the awesome Mozilla Midas Spec.

So when the user publishes online, you get all the structured rhymes inserted into the database. The visual display of the rhyme also matches that in the authoring tool, since they can use pretty much the same CSS and everything.

One of the cool advantages of the structured content can be seen in the search feature in Phloneme. You can search for rhyming words for a particular word, and it will return live results from Vocab Collab.

If the user simply wants to copy and paste some rhymes from a search result into his own document, an automatic attribution and link will be created, so once published it will link to the work it derived from. That brings up another feature that I’ve added, which is the ability to select a Creative Commons license when publishing.

This was just one of those personal project ideas that I thought would be cool. Don’t really know what to do with it now. I sure did learn a lot about XULRunner, XUL, and the Midas spec while working on it though.

If you would like to play around with Phloneme, go ahead and have fun. You don’t need a Vocab Collab account unless you plan on publishing. Bust a rhyme!

Getting started tutorial on Phloneme. (With some screenshots)

Phloneme

I’m not done with the XUL Dark Matter series, still have a couple to go yet!

I will be headed to Chi-town for Flex Camp later this month. Really interested to meet some people and in Labriola’s building Flex components session. Should be fun!

BTW, went to register and noticed that all attendees now get a copy of Adobe Flex 2: Training From The Source!

There is limited capacity, so if you’re interested you’d better sign up soon!