Adobe and Facebook have announced today that the Actionscript 3.0 API for Facebook is now available. Good news for developers who work in both areas and have had to rely on server-side coding to integrate Facebook data into Flash content or even make the two "Worlds" work together smoothly - take the Apprentice Game which I integrated into Facebook for Legacy Interactive, for example.

The game needed to be integrated into Facebook and to gain the ability to save scores which would then be shown on the global and friends' score tables.

In this case I implemented the scoring logic with Flash Remoting and PHP.

Now this may not be necessary. At the very least, the instantiation of the Facebook API and retrieval of user data can now be done 100% in AS3.0. I've yet to take a look at the API but will be doing so and writing more about it here!

Meanwhile, here's a great video from Daniel Dura, Platform Evangelist at Adobe focusing on the Flash Platform, and lots of other materials available to get you started:

The Adobe Developer Connection page for the Flash Facebook API can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/facebook/

Watch this space for more feedback once I've had a chance to try the API out!

Robert

Comment moderation is in operation on this blog so it's pointless entering a long list of URLs about Air Jordans, Prozac, Male Enhancement (or female enhancement for that matter) or just about anything else you'd like to spread via email relay...

Yes, that means YOU!

Cool! "This is going to change everything..."

The rumours appear to be true. According to, amongst others, the Wall Street Journal the new Skype iPhone App will be released tomorrow.

Their article quotes prices for calls from AT&T iPhones using the App to call Landlines but there's no data for Europe in this article ... watch this space.

Key points, based on news so far, are:

• The App will work over Wi-Fi only. Makes sense.
• SkypeIn and SkypeOut are supported, along with Skype chat
• iPhone Contact integration is included - nice.
• Group chats and conference calls are also supported

Sounds like a well-rounded product so far. What is excellent news is that those of us who use Skype for chat amongst business colleagues for keeping in touch on project status can now do so with Skype on the move too.

Depending on your price plan and the amount of data you have included, this could turn out to be an attractive option for calls abroad. It's going to be useful for conference calls too, provided the memory management is good.

As soon as I've taken a first look at the App on my iPhone I'll post my impressions here.

Come back soon for more!

Robert

So, a little late but all the prettier for it! Here's the Weekly Wordle #4:

As I said, it's all the prettier for the introduction of some new words from the posts over the weekend - again, more variety ;-)

More posts coming this week, including my first jQuery AJAX tutorial. Watch this space!

Happy Monday!

Robert

Take a scroll down the right-hand side of this blog and you will see that I have removed the Creative Commons License and reverted to specific copyright protection.

Why? Some rather interesting facts have come to light about a certain publishing house over the last few days. It seems that they are doing nothing short of scraping blogs and recycling content under the auspices of a "publishing portal" labelled with their brand, claiming the original blog authors as their own featured authors as if the content was written specifically for them.

Not only that, but some of the authors' names sound very funny - "Sybase Techwave 2001" anybody? Is that Mr. Techwave, or Mr. 2001? Just "Sybase" to his/her friends? hm...

It's clear that they've recycled articles from their own publications as well in their attempts to launch the industry's most hugest portal...

What has also become clear is that one or two of the "authors" with whom I have contact have been met with quite a bit of abuse when they asked for their content to be removed. One has since been the target of both racial and sexual libel on the internet by the publisher in question.

In an effort to appease some of those effected, an article has also appeared on the portal stating that all authors will be paid 200% of the AdSense fees earned on their articles pages. Cool, you steal my content to fill up your so-called huge media portal and are so kind as to give me 200% of the AdSense click fees earned on that page. Never mind the fact that you can only build up your portal by scouring your archives and the net for anything vaguely useful and then publish it without paying or correctly acknowledging your theft of content!

Not a good deal.

The only credit that this portal deserves is credit for their cheek and having built some cool web robots to scrape the content - although the latter were probably developed by anonymous freelancers anyway

So. No, I'm not going to give them the credit of mentioning their name, or the name of the portal in question. Take a guess, google around a bit. Pick any short-lived tech. title with "Journal" at the end of it's name and you're getting close to the publisher.

Either way, anything I have written or may write in the future is now a no-go zone for content thieves. Code will be shared - that's not going to change and such content will be explicitly marked as shareable - but as far as the rest is concerned it's back to the old approach. Maybe one day I'll write something that somebody may want to "reuse"!

Meanwhile, have a great Sunday all!

Robert