For all of you aspiring WidgetMakers out there, here's an article I wrote about packaging and distributing custom components.

Between this article and the MXI Editor panel offered for free on this site, you should have no everything you need to start creating your own custom widgets.

I'm going to MAX! I just found out yesterday that my company is sending me to MAX, and in less than 5 days, I'll be hanging out with my fellow user group managers at the pre-conference user group event in the Community Pit.

I've got some really great sessions lined up and I'll also be attending a cocktail reception for user group managers and the Birds of a Feather meeting with the Flash Engineering team. It'll be great to finally put faces to the names and drill those guys with questions face-to-face. I also look forward to finally meeting the editor of my book ("Flash Out of the Box"), Bruce Epstein, and my friend, CSS guru Stephanie Sullivan.

Mostly, though, MAX should prove as an excellent opportunity to talk with Macromedia directly about the future of our favorite web technologies (like Flash) and get some serious inspiration.

I'll be blogging while I'm there, so check in and see what's up.

Macromedia offered a glimpse into the future with a next generation Flash Player demo yesterday in Tokyo.

See video of the preso here.

I saw this article on LocalConnection yesterday and read through it, and it was good and useful. One thing bothered me, though - the author kept saying that LocalConnection was introduced mainly for use with Macromedia Central and that's not true. LocalConnection was introduced with Flash Player 6 and has been used in countless applications since then. As far as I know, Central wasn't even a concept yet when LocalConnection was implemented. So while I don't mean to nitpick, I wanted to point out the misinformation.

At any rate, there will be another article on LocalConnection soon, available in InformIT.com's Flash Reference Guide, as part of the 10 Minutes with Flash series I've been working on for the past several months. I just wrote it and turned it in last week, so it'll probably be about a month before it goes live, but you can certainly read through all the other articles in the series while you wait.

Yes, it's just another funny(?) video clip wrapped in a Flash movie, but this one has got some people in my user group, including me, using every method they can to grab stills from this video clip to determine whether or not the man hit by the car was actually injured.

From what we can tell, the man does get hit, the car hits the brakes, and the guy's head goes face-first into the hood.

Or not.

So you be the judge. How dead is this guy?

Google has released a desktop search application that enables you to do private searches through your Outlook email, browser cache, and many other things, giving you the power of Google on your own computer. It's only available on Windows, so I can't use it at home, but at work, this thing has already proven itself very useful.

It's free and very cool, so check it out!