Alex Tokman talks about the Microvision Pico Projector

LegacyCaptivateLoader: dealing with pre-existing scripts in your Captivate SWF

New: LegacyCaptivateLoader class for Flash lets you embed Captivate in Flash and communicate between them

Pipwerks has published a great article that addresses some issues that plague Captivate users who need a little extra control and customisation.

"Many of us use a Flash-based course interface (a.k.a. ‘player’) to load Captivate SWFs and other content. A well-known stumbling block for this kind of ‘loaded SWF’ approach has been Captivate’s lack of ActionScript support — Captivate won’t allow a user to add a simple line of custom ActionScript anywhere. This means that Captivate does not natively support direct SWF-to-SWF communication.

Here’s a common scenario where this might be a problem:

A developer wants to load a Captivate SWF into a ‘player’ SWF. She wants the Captivate SWF to automatically unload when it’s done playing. To do this, she’d simply like the Captivate SWF to call an ActionScript function named “unloadMe()” at the end of the movie.

Since Captivate doesn’t support custom ActionScript, this seemingly innocent bit of scripting can’t be done… at least not natively."

Read the whole article here.

Adobe merges business units serving PCs, mobile

"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Adobe Systems Inc (ADBE.O) said on Monday it was putting under one roof businesses selling software for computers, phones and consumer electronics to make them run on a single technology platform. "

The announcement is part of a series of management restructuring moves Adobe is making following the planned retirement of two long-time executives, effective May 1. A spokeswoman said no employee job losses would result.
The move represents the further consolidation of its 2005 Macromedia acquisition with the broader Adobe organization while also recognizing the growing convergence of once-distinct software and the need for it to run across a range of devices.
Read more here on Yahoo News.

Opera Mini 4.1 Beta

Opera has released the beta version 4.1 of their super Opera Mini browser for mobile devices

better, faster stronger ...

The native browser for Nokia devices is already pretty good - it's based on the same WebKit foundation that has also the foundation of Apple's Safari browser used by Mac and iPhone. But I really like Opera Mini - it's very fast, by virtue of the use of Opera's proxy server and some sweet compression that reduces the size of the download for most web pages.

New features include:-

• up to 50% speed improvements,
• auto-complete feature for URLs
• the ability to search for specific words within a page (something I've long missed on my mobile browsers!)
• a new file manager for easy access to your system when uploading and downloading files..

Opera Mini is a Java application, so should run on most devices that support Java. This version now works on Blackberries too.

If you haven't tried Opera Mini yet, then you should try this version because it adds desktop-like speed to your mobile browsing, even on slower EDGE connections.

mobile,browser,opera mini