Author: Stefan Richter

Today Adobe announced and released Flash Media Server 4 which they are currently showcasing at IBC in Amsterdam.

New Enterprise Edition The first thing to note is a new edition of FMS, the Enterprise edition - let's call it FMES. It joins the familiar Developer edition (free), Flash Media Streaming Server (FMSS) and the Flash Media Interactive Server (FMIS). The price points for FMSS and FMIS remain unchanged at $995 and $4500 respectively whilst FMES's price is available upon request - so it's likely to be pretty pricey.

Author: Gordon French

An array is basically a container for holding data, similar to the way a variable hold data. The difference is that an array can hold multiple pieces of data. The location of each piece of data is referred to as its index and will always fall in a specific sequence. These indexes are numbers sequentially and begin at zero. Since Flash numbers each piece of data within the array it is easy for the programmer to access a specific piece of data at any given time. In ActionScript you are not forced to contain one type of data in an array.

Author: John Melwak

Flash design has been a controversial issue among Web designers for a long time. Most designers I have spoke with either love it or hate it. It seems to be there is no in the middle here. Well, for the designers that like flash (one of them being me) things are changing - slowly changing may I add.

Author: Mike Belasco

6 different web designers have asked me about making Flash SEO friendly in the last month, so I'll post some tips here.

Most SEOs would agree that Flash is not really SEO friendly (yet). This is because all the content (text) is inside the flash movie and the spiders can't read it or at least usually chooses not to index that content. Supposedly SEs can index some content embedded in Flash but I have not seen any sites banking on this theory successfully.

Author: Vijayanand Yadla

Points to be considered when planning a Flash based web site:

1. Purpose of the web site: If the primary purpose of the web site is to offer artistic or visual effects to the visitors (such as a business that is primarily a Design/Arts company, with visitors coming to the web site on some reference other than search engines) then Flash is recommended.

Author: Oleg Ishenko

Building Flash-powered websites is wrong. Storing your content in Flash movies is wrong. Implementing site navigation in Flash is wrong.

Then why are there so many Flash sites? They look pretty with all those neat vector graphics, gradients, animations and cool sound effects. Flash is the favorite toy of big designer studios and numerous amateur graphic artists alike.