MX Traveler

10 technologies to watch in 2005...

October's edition of Business 2.0 runs some cool articles. There is a story on the guys behind Oddpost, who recently sold their 15-month old company to Yahoo for a whopping $29 million. There is also a featured article on the hottest technoloies of 2004 that includes Voice-over-IP and Open Source databases. At the end of the article they mention 10 technologies to watch.

In the top 10, right next between 'Missile Defense Shield' and 'Titanium Graphite Wings' is our beloved 'Rich Internet Application' listed! One point, they have Gmail as an example of a RIA, which imo isn't really one, but that's nitpicking.

What's more important is, that this is a magazine that gets read by (your) manager and their managers, so the message isn't only coming from down the pyramid ( the developers ) but also from top-down.

I have included a Flashpaper and a downloadable PDF version of the article.

V2 Components large? Use Ariaware Optimizer!

This is such a cool tool, and the website has gone live just an hour ago. It's a great Windows-only application, delivered by Aral, Burak, Tolga and Peter to make your lives much, much easier. The 30 second geek elevator pitch version:

It extracts out common classes from your SWF's, and put them into a RSL that gets linked into your original SWF's so you only need to preload the RSL instead ( it also comes with a Class Manager class ).

For more marketing material you can throw at management, see below:

“Reduce the bandwidth of your Flash web sites and applications!

Ariaware Optimizer is a revolutionary Windows-only tool that can dramatically reduce the size of your Macromedia Flash web sites and applications (RIAs.)

Even if you have an HTML-based web site, you may be able to take advantage of Ariaware Optimizer if your site contains two or more Flash files (SWFs) that use the Version 2 components or share classes.”

SWFConverter

Right, i recently needed a way to test something that required changing the version of hundreds of SWF files from one version to another ( dont' ask ). I found that a good opportunity to work on the SWF format on a lower level, and also to brush up my Perl skills ( had to be done in Perl ), so here's a little tool that just does that: changing the version of a SWF file without opening up the original FLA and publish it again. It's a commandline utility, so it can be called from within other scripts or through bash or the likes.

Usage: ./SWFConverter.pl [-hc] -v -i file [-o outputfile]
-h : This (help) message
-c : Returns SWF version
-v : SWF version integer
-i file : SWF input file
-o file : SWF output file

Example: ./SWFConverter.pl -v 7 -i foo.swf -o bar.swf

or

Example: ./SWFConverter.pl -c -i bar.swf

Download SWFConverter.pl and make it executable ( i'm lazy so i usually do a chmod 755 )

Credits go to Jonas Galvez for helping me out ( plus i reckon he's going to post a 5 liner Python alternative ;-) )