This is slightly old news but my friend and former co-worker, Geoff Stearns, has announced the beta for version 2 of his infamous swfObject on Google code. In case you haven’t heard, swfObject is probably your best, most powerful, and easiest option when it comes to embedding Flash Player content into an HTML page. The new version was rewritten from scratch and hopefully will become the official, de-facto solution for embedding SWF files in webpages. Kudos Geoff!

Update: We’re up on iTunes!

A few weeks ago we asked you what you would want to hear from a new Flash podcast. The votes came in with a tutorial based podcast in the lead with 44%, followed by a discussion by experts with 18% and a healthy chunk of you (16%) thought it was irresponsible for us to bring another new podcast soul into this cruel world.

You told us what you wanted to hear and we listened to you.

But then we decided to ignore your suggestions and do something completely different.

It’s my pleasure to present Skrypt Kidz 3000 — a new semi-regular podcast where a barbarous crew of Flash and Flex developers get together to spend our precious weekend hours yakking about Flash issues. In our inaugural episode we discuss the pros and cons of using Flex over Flash. We also talk about Flex and FDT pricing and Adobe’s new wireframing tool Thermo.

After nearly a year in development I’m very proud to announce that the ActionScript 3.0 bible has hit the shelves. This is our first book and its very exciting for us. The AS3 Bible is not just an update to the previous edition, the Flash 8 ActionScript Bible, but was written from the ground up with ActionScript 3.0 development in mind. We tried to focus on topics that matter to real world developers and to make it just as useful for experienced AS2 developers as it is for beginning programmers.

We’ve put a lot into this book and sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Get it at Amazon

NOTE: many people have been complaining about the lack of code on the companion site. We’re currently working with our publisher to get that sorted out as soon as possible and hopefully it should be up by the end of the week.

I asked a passing hobo to pose for a picture with the new Bible

Anyway, I worked on this site for about the last six months of my tenure at Schematic. It’s all AS3, with no Flex. I took the designs and features that had been built up over the last year, during which the company had aborted several attempts to build the vastly ambitious site, and assembled a schedule, tasks, a feasible set of functionality, a general approach, a process to follow, and an architecture, and then set to work. I was joined in my development by two great developers, Michael Avila and Jeff Yamada, who saw the site through to the end, and who made it possible for me to take time to write the AS3 bible while working on the site. But before I get into thanking everyone…
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They say you shouldn’t count your eggs before they hatch, but I figure this is more like counting your fetuses in the third trimester. Either way, I’d like to announce that our new book, ActionScript 3.0 Bible (Wiley), is in the final stages of editing and will be out this Fall! Roger Braunstein, Joey Lott, Josh Noble, and myself, Mims Wright have been busily typing since August or so to make it happen. As this is our first book (except for Joey) we’re very excited to see it finally coming together.

The description on Amazon is gravely inaccurate and the cover design is atrocious, however, you are welcome to pre-purchase it with my guarantee that it is not bad.

The AS3 Bible is a comprehensive guide to learning ActionScript 3.0. It’s platform agnostic with regards to Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder - we focus on ActionScript only rather than frameworks. Every effort has been made to approach the language from a point of view where a beginner with little programming knowledge could pick up the book and learn AS3. At the same time the book addresses the needs of experienced Flash programmers by highlighting the new features in AS3 as they relate to previous versions of ActionScript. We think this book will be a great read for beginning to intermediate developers looking to learn ActionScript 3.0 and will make a great reference book for more advanced developers. Look for it in September or October of 2007