Apple may have more to gain than anyone else with HTML5, but the ultimate loser in this battle may be the apple community itself. There is a Chinese saying that covers this nicely: Be careful what you wish for.

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Flash’s ubiquity is in its presence on the vast majority of PC desktops, laptops and netbooks. It is also in a surprising, and growing, percentage of mobile devices. Software developers who want to tap this rapidly expanding market face many challenges that have not existed in the PC world for quite some time. Here is a book that is virtually encyclopedic in its review of the pitfalls and dangers for mobile development and how they can be avoided, even for the iPhone. It provides rich information detail on how to address mobile software development now, along with a preview of how it can be done easier when what is in the oven finishes baking.

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Using encapsulated components instead of reinventing wheels in code have been around from some time, for both GUI elements and nonvisible functional blocks such as communications protocol handlers. Here is a brief sampler of some for Adobe’s Flex 3 development tool.

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Online searches driven by keywords get their results from spidering text in pages’ html scripts. Completely graphics driven web pages, like pure Flash or Rich Internet Applications with Adobe’s Flex or Microsoft’s Silverlight, are invisible to search engine scans. Here’s a way to quickly and easily add searchable content.

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Adobe’s ActionScript 3 has many things in common with regular compiled languages, with a specialized focus on the Flash player and engine. Here’s a good desk reference to avoid drowning in the online help that often times is a hindrance for here and now how to use it information.

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If digital image manipulation is like painting, then this book by Todd Yard is like listening to a painter describe a desired artistic effect, using Actionscript as a set of brushes, the classes as a palette, and Flash as the canvas.
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Rich Internet Applications, aka RIAs, are encountering some interesting problems that seem new to a lot of developers. Like many other things, these are really old problems that were solved a long time ago.

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Written by Paul Tondeur and Jeff Winder, from Packt Publishing, also available from
Amazon; ISBN 9781847195722. Probably should have been titled The Missing Manual if that hadn’t already been taken. Interesting that it took two Dutchmen to come up with a book in English, published in England, indicative Papervision3D’s international activity.
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Adobe’s Action Script Three is more than an improvement over the previous version. It has all the power of the best OOP techniques, making it far easier and quicker to accomplish exploiting Flash. In short, it is, for us at least, an enabling tool that opens new possibilities.
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Those extra entries, the CAPTCHAs, visitors have to make to prove they are human are annoying enough, but they also don’t solve the problem they were intended to solve. Here’s a Flex way to get rid of them and make your visitor experience even better. (more…)