By now you must have heard about the Adobe Image Foundation code-named Hydra, and as usually with anything new in the Flash Player Tinic has a nice informative post.

Hydra is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms in a hardware-independent manner.

Joa already has a load of examples here, here and here and Mario also has a few examples up here and here.

You can download the AIF toolkit here and Kevin Goldsmith’s blog is worth keeping an eye on as well as Tinic’s for more info.

Theres a nice little article about how Flash 8 is shaping up (the good and the bad) in July’s issue of Creative Review titled ‘Flash Grows Up’, accompanied by a brief history of Flash.

It features the likes of Joshua Davis, Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship), Jon McVey (Zaaz) and Florian Schmitt (Hi-ReS!).

Worth a browse if your near a magazine store hanging around.

When using FileReference or FileReferenceList it is more than likely you will need to know the associate Macintosh file type with the Windows file type to limit the type of files your users can select.

The reason MM had to implement this is that Windows identifies a file type by its extension and associates it with an application and its icon. Because of this only one application and icon will be associated with any one file type. When you double-click a file in Windows, the same application will open it despite the fact that it may have been created (saved) in another application. The Macintosh file system stores more information about a file than just its type, it also stores information about its creator (which is why you get the extra creator property when using FileReference on a Mac). It stores this information as file type and creator codes in each file and therefore the system can associate more than one application with any one kind of file.

Here’s a list of some of the main Macintosh file types you may require.
NOTE: ‘_’ represents a space character.
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I’m working on a project at the moment that will run in a few languages and one of them requires cyrillic characters. The font we’re using is Helvetica World Font Family from Linotype, which has all the characters we require.

But when trying to use cyrillic text dynamically none of the characters showed. It didn’t matter whether I embeded the font in the library or in the TextField itself. What was strange was that if i changed the font to Arial, then all the characters would show fine, so I figured it must be the font.

It turns out that Flash didn’t seem to be embeding the cyrillic characters, even if i specifically listed them.

The solution was to create a new TextField on the Stage and have a least one character from the cyrillic set in it, any character. This one character seemed to force all the cyrillic characters to be embeded and appear correctly. I also had to remove the font from the library and and make sure it was only embeded in TextField instances.

Thanks for the tip Javier!