Joystiq recently reported about the Wii Internet Channel upgrade:

The version of Flash used in the Wii browser has been updated from Flash 7 to Flash Lite 3.1 — which should make the Internet Channel much more useful. [Moreover, the] Internet Channel is now free in North America.

Source: joystiq.com

An Adobe security advisory has been posted regarding a vulnerability with Adobe Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player:

A critical vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader v9 on Windows.

Read the full bulletin on adobe.com and the blog post from Adobe PSIRT for more details.

According to a post on Joystiq, Nicalis game developer Tyrone Rodriguez recenlty attended a developer summit in which Nintendo revealed that it is now “possible to develop Wii games entirely using Flash.” There aren’t a lot of details at the moment, but it’s suspected this move is targeted towards downloadable WiiWare games.

GE has applied Augmented Reality to an actual campaign with Plug Into the Smart Grid. The basic ideas are the same as in the original, but their 3D models are just a bit more complex than in Boffswana’s demo. GE also provided a link to the FLARToolKit, which is used to “detect the marker from input image and calculate the camera position in the three dimension space.”

Flash ‘n’ SEO launched late last year in order to “[discover] how our favorite search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN index content in Adobe Flash.” Currently, the group is publishing experiments in attempts to reverse engineer Google’s Flash Search Player. If Flash and SEO is something you’re passionate about, they are looking for contributors.

When I first learned that Rob Ford from The FWA edited a book entitled Guidelines for Online Success, I immediately went out and purchased it. After all, I’m a Flash developer and I avidly check what’s on The FWA – naturally, I’m curious to know what they would recommend as “guidelines for online success.”

The chapters are arranged by subject (interface & design, marketing & communication, technology & programming, technical advice, content/content management and e-commerce), each with an introduction from an experienced member of the industry. For the most part these intros give you a nice bit of insight into the mindsets of some of the bigger names in web design. The intro by Martin Hughes and Jordan Stone of WEFAIL was particularly good.

After the introduction, each chapter then proceeds into a series of do/don’t type lists with examples of sites relating to each list’s topic. This is where they really dropped the ball. Most of the advice they give can pretty much be boiled down to common sense. You’re supposed to use good quality images on your sites? People don’t like annoying Flash intros? No kidding! And since the majority of the example sites in the book were launched between 2004 and 2006, the majority of examples given have already become outdated already.

If you’re looking for anything other than a common sense refresher, you’ll find yourself somewhat disappointed with Guidelines for Online Success. I wouldn’t recommend Guidelines for Online Success, unless you want an FWA link dump from the last eight years.

Everyone is talking about it, so we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Big Spaceship’s Pretty Loaded. Pretty Loaded is a collection of Flash preloaders packaged in a neat, sit back and watch format.

Initially, having already read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook, I wasn’t planning on reading another book focusing on introductory ActionScript 3, but then I started to hear more and more about Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. Lee Brimelow is quoted on the cover calling it “The best ActionScript book ever written.” How can you argue with that recommendation?

For beginners, the book does a good job explaining core language fundamentals (variables, conditionals, loops, functions, etc.) and each aspect you would control with the language (vectors, pixels, sound, video, xml, etc.). And throughout the book’s tutorials the reader is shown the steps involved in building an XML based website, giving a nice continuity to some of the later chapters and reinforcing the importance of understanding the material.

As an experienced Flash developer, I particularly liked Chapter 7 on motion. They did an excellent job explaining how to use basic geometry and trigonometry within your Flash Projects for positioning and animation. It was a welcomed refresher.

I would recommend Learning ActionScript 3.0 to anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with Flash development. Otherwise, you would be doing yourself a disservice.

Tyler Hawes at Mode pointed me to an informative MAX presentation by Jim Corbett, a Flash Player Engineer at Adobe, on SWF Searchability. He covers how the Flash Search Player (i.e., Ichabod, the headless Flash Player) works, what Google can get out of your SWF files for indexing as well as generally clearing up questions regarding the current state of Flash SEO.

Following the FlaCC demos at past conferences, Adobe has released Alchemy on Adobe Labs.

Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

You can find more information and download the Alchemy toolkit on Adobe Labs.