Recently, I got to know about that Microsoft has acquired Lookout, frankly speaking I never heard about Lookout until this news.
I saw the Lookout website and found that it's a very good search plugin for MS Outlook. I downloaded it and started using, it's damn fast and saves loads of time.
I guess, Microsoft would add more features and values to the plugin or use the algorithm in coming version of Outlook.
It can be downloaded from here.
Macromedia today released the Flash MX 2004 updater 7.2. Flash MX 2004 had many bugs and most of them seem to be fixed in this update.
Help documentation and code samples are brilliant. EventDelegate AS2 class has also been included.
More information can be found on http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/special/7_2updater/
I hope it solves most of the problems.
I found a very good online book on making an Accessible website. The title of book is "Dive Into Accessibility" Author has taken some real life scenarios. He has talked about different type of disablities and how can we make our content accessible for those people.
Interesting fact is that, through-out the book, examples are given on customizing a MT blog to be more accessible. That's interesting, I am reading the book once again and hopefully customize my blog to be more accessible.
Macromedia has released new versions of Contribute and FlashPaper.
Though Contribute is a great product but I have not played a lot with it.
But FlashPaper has been my favourite tool, I had used it when Contribute 2 was released and I published my resume from MS Word to SWF format. Having resume in swf format gives me good feeling. Why not? I am a Flash developer :)
The latest version of FlashPaper 2, which has some really interesting and cool features like:-
More info can be found here.
FlashPaper 2 is available as standalone version as well as it also comes bundled with Contribute 3.
If you buy FlashPaper 2, it only costs $79. So price is very less, I guess, I am also going buy it.
Believe me, its very handy tool. You go and convert any document to swf and upload it. And we know flash player is available on almost all machines.
Ok, do you want to give a try before you make a decision? Why not download trial version from here and play.
ASV - Action Script Viewer
A few days, I talked about ASV add-on tools. Lately I also tried ASV and I must say its a 'must-have' tool for designers or developers.
Imagine a situation, a client comes back and asks you to make some changes in his site or application you did in past. Now, if you have source files its simple but if you don't remember where are latest files. Believe me, ASV can help you out here. It can create entire FLA for you through JSFL.
If you have lost some assets or source files from your machine and you only have swf files then ASV can extract following things for you.
- font outlines as TTF
- sound as WAV or MP3
- videos as FLV
- frames/graphics/movieclips/library symbols as SWFs
- bitmaps as JPG/PNG
- ofcourse all ActionScript code (scripts or class scripts)
ASV is very intuitive and user friendly to use, so anyone can easily start using without any problems. I love the timeline thingy and preview feature.
And ofcourse, if you want to study your compiled swf, ASV would help you there also. Peter Hall was able to come up with this idea while he was working in ASV.
Though some guys use ASV for wrong purpose, I would just request, please use the tool for ethically right reason. Its a nice tool made for nice purpose.