Today, Aaron Simpson at Cold Hard Flash posted a few videos demonstrating the new Bone Tool and Inverse Kinematics features of Flash CS4.

The Bone Tool basically allows you to group objects together as a flexible jointed object similar to how you’d rig a skeleton in a 3D application.

I recently discovered the Adobe, Make Some Noise campaign blog. Their mission:

We want you and the whole Flash community to be aware of the issue that the current and possible future versions of the Flash Player will lack dynamic audio capabilities. You may ask why this is important but currently a lot of companies are developing online applications for text, video and image processing. We see software moving into the internet daily. Only audio is missing at the moment.

Their site lists out current Flash audio projects and suggests a wishlist for Adobe to consider. I think their cause is a valid one and, being an advocate for music myself, I’d like to see these advancements included into the Flash Player. Audio in Flash has definitely come a long way, but these recommendations could further solidify its already substantial lead.

What is Adobe Flash Paper you ask? Yeah, I don’t know exactly either but as of yesterday Adobe has decided to discontinue the product.

Adobe will continue to sell and support the current FlashPaper 2 version, but won’t be updating the technology to support Microsoft Windows Vista and IE7, which will make it virtually worthless.

If you’re dying to dig deeper, you can read more here.

Word on the street is that Adobe will be revealing CS4 on September 23rd. This is not a launch date, but we should get some juicy details to wet our palette until it does come out. If you were going to buy CS3, it may be worthwhile to hold off for a month or two (if at all possible).

Joshua Davis basically stopped demoing new techniques and prototypes with the end of Praystation. So, it’s exciting to see him launch a new Lab section on joshuadavis.com. Apparently, he’s been “hiding prototypes for years” and now has decided to start getting them out in the open again. Some of the concepts there now are not all that new, but no one constructs Flash demos and prototypes with as much style and aesthetic consideration. It’s always nice to see what he’s up to.

All those testing the Flash Player 10 beta should go download the new release candidate. The August 11th release will update your player to version 10.0.2.26.

Udpate: 10.0.12.10 was released on September 15th.

ZDNet.com reported yesterday on a bug in the Flash Player that will allow the system clipboard to be hijacked. The attack inserts “a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program” into the clipboard that can not be removed without restarting the browser and/or the OS itself. Slashdot, of course, pounced on the story and linked to researcher with a harmless demo of the technique.

While not quite in the “cool” category of Flash industry news, it’s at least good to be in the know. In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively low grade bug. However, it doesn’t help the cause.

Recently, I read a blog post on yewknee.com mentioning a Flash framework called Gaia, which is based on the idea of scaffolding made popular by Ruby on Rails. Here is what Gaia is all about:

Gaia is targeted at anyone who develops Flash sites. It provides solutions to the challenges and repeated tasks we all face with front-end Flash site development, such as navigation, transitions, preloading, asset management, site structure, deep linking and SEO. It provides speed and flexibility in your workflow and a simple API that gives you access to its powerful features.

Gaia’s revolutionary scaffolding engine generates all your Flash files and classes for you and gets you up and running with a fully functional site in less than 10 minutes without writing a single line of Actionscript!

Gaia enables you to develop feature-rich websites with significantly less code, and comes with built-in best practices including seamless integration with SWFObject and SWFAddress.

Gaia was created by Steven Sacks and you can download and/or read about it here. I’m in the process of building a site using Gaia and will update my opinions as they form. Hopefully, I’ll be vacationing in Maui in the coming weeks due to how much time this is going to save me. Mahalo!

Right on the heels of Lee Brimelow’s recent AMFPHP tutorial, it appears Zend will be adding support for AMFPHP. As reported by Brimelow on The Flash Blog:

It is good timing to tell you that AMF will soon be coming to the Zend Framework. Much like AMFPHP, the proposed Zend_Amf component will make communication between Flash and PHP lightining fast.

FITC usually schedules a series of conversations between big names in the design and development world to promote their conferences. Lately, I’ve been loading up a conversation from the recent Toronto conference in the background while I work at home. So far, the Colin Moock/Jim Corbett conversation has been the most interesting, but they’re all worth checking out—if only to listen to people speak intelligently about Flash, creativity and web development.

Stream the FITC Toronto 2008 Conversations over on the FITC site.