To be officially announced Oct 5, an upcoming version of Flash Player will support “ultra smooth” HD playback using GPU acceleration with almost every Nvidia GPU supported, even on smartphones.

http://gizmodo.com/5370126/gpu+accelerated-flash-player-provides-smooth-hd-video-arrives-next-month

It’s sale time at Adobe, apparently! Found a couple of good deals, depending on your situation… thought I’d pass them along.

10% off any CS4 purchase, suite or individual product, full or upgrades: Enter code 10offAdobe at checkout to receive the discount!

Students: Adobe Back to School Source: studenteditions.adobe.com
Heading back to school? Then check out the Adobe Back to School Gallery for inspiration and low student pricing, including savings of up to 80% on Adobe Creative Suite 4.

I’m presenting a half-day pre-conference workshop at this year’s Streaming Media West conference in San Jose, on Nov. 16, 2009: Developing a Rich Video Player for the Adobe Flash Platform. I presented this workshop a few months ago at Streaming Media East — the first time I had given more than a one-hour session — to a nice full room. Based on the feedback from that session, I’m fleshing out the workshop with more hands-on exercises and real-world examples.

Sign up now and get a $200 discount using this link: http://tinyurl.com/ldetsc

And remember, Streaming Media West also has an exhibit hall that is open pre-registered attendees for free! You can register for this free pass at the same URL above.

Hope to see you there!

Time to trim a bit of fat, so I have moved my blog to a new, more affordable host. When you see this post, it means the transfer is complete! If you see any weird stuff with the blog, missing links, etc. please let me know with a comment so I can get it fixed before the old host is bye-bye. Thanks!

UPDATE: Oh, and it seems that I have lost all of the registered users. So you’ll need to sign up again so I have your info. Thx!

I resisted valiantly, but I’ve finally given in. The FMS engineering team signing up was the last straw.

I’m now on Twitter.

http://www.twitter.com/lisamarienyc

I’ll be tweeting on miscellaneous Flash news, tips, tricks, etc. as well as day-to-day updates. But I won’t be telling you what I had for breakfast, I promise.

FOTB is going punk, as you can see from this year’s banners (just there, down and to your right)… so get ready! This year is going to be as jam-packed as ever with great speakers, inspiring content, and, of course plenty of beer and chips.

Soooper-dooper early bird tickets go on sale May 18, and be sure to sign up for the newsletter for reminders and updates:
http://Flashonthebeach.com

It’s a bit earlier this year, Sept. 20-23rd, so the weather in Brighton should be great. Since I missed it last year, I’m really looking forward to it. It’s one of the few conferences I’ll be speaking at this year, since I now have a little one in tow. Hope to see you there!

In their ongoing effort to encourage more women to get involved in the Flash community (an initiative near and dear to my heart) the organizers of Flash in the Can are sponsoring a contest to send 100 women to FitC Toronto.

FITC Toronto 2009 (website)
The Design & Technology Festival
April 25-28, 2009 // Hilton Toronto. Canada

So, if you are one of those talented, underrepresented women, tell them so in a video post or Flash animation WHY you want to go to FitC Toronto!

To Enter, just complete the form and send them the link to your video. The first 100 entries they get will receive a free festival ticket to FITC Toronto 2009! It’s that easy!

Don’t miss out; FitC Toronto is a world-class event. I’m regrettably missing it this year, but you, GO! REPRESENT!

A fake Flash Player upgrade is being used to cloak a nasty piece of malware.

Be on the lookout for email that looks like a news item linking you to a video. The page then prompts you to download an ‘updated’ version of the Flash Player.

Bastards!

Information here: http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/obamaspeech.asp

Yes, the day is finally here! Flash Media Server 3 and Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0 have been officially released.

Download Flash Media Server 3.5 (free developer version)

Download Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0 (FREE)

Flash Media Server 3.5 offers some powerful new features such as improved H.264 performance, “DVR” functionality, Dynamic Streaming, and HTTP delivery (Apache server built in). For more info, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/fms.

The licensing costs have stayed the same, at $4,500 for Flash Media Interactive Server and $999 for Flash Media Streaming Server. The Developer edition is still free, and allows 10 simultaneous connections (can be used for commercial deployments).

Flash Media Live Encoder has also been upgraded, with support for multiple bitrate encoding (to take advantage of Dynamic Streaming in FMS 3.5), an updated user interface, enhanced auto-adjust capabilities to accommodate fluctuation in your connection when encoding, and improved file and stream management including file “chunking”.

Big day for Flash media — happy downloading!

You may have noticed I’ve been pretty scarce for the past few weeks; as you may have guessed, Leela Grace has finally arrived. I went into labor on Wednesday, November 12th (good thing I decided not to attend FlashCodersNY that night!) and gave birth to “little” 8lb. 3oz. Leela at 4:33am. Everyone’s healthy (though sleep-deprived) and I plan to return to “active duty” early in 2009. I’ll try to keep up with comments and questions, but if it takes me a bit longer to reply, you’ll know why!

p.s. Yes, that is an Adobe t-shirt… finally found a use for all those Xtra large shirts, hehe.