Flash wrappers, as I tend to call the genre of software Screentime's mProjector belongs to, have been around almost as long as Flash itself. Whatever the reason for their rise (the decline of Director, needing offline access to online content, etc.), there are still several options out there for turning your Flash content into desktop applications. And while Adobe's own AIR technology seems to get all the press, there is no reason why mProjector shouldn't be considered one of the top dogs in cross-platform Flash desktop app creation.

Ah, the simple, venerable trace command. Everyone who has ever written even a single line of ActionScript -- from the newbiest of designers to the most seasoned programming professional -- has doubtless become intimately familiar with this most basic, approachable, and useful command. But love turns to hate if you ever need to see what's going on when your Flash movie is playing in a browser, where seeing a simple trace can rapidly become an exercise in frustration. Fret no longer, fearless readers, as this guide aims to get everyone in on that sweet, sweet browser tracing action.

Let's face facts, folks: sometimes just scaling your entire Flash movie to an arbitrary window size won't cut it. A prime example of one of those times would be if you're using Flash to create Web-based applications, where your users would rightfully expect to have the application interface scale intelligently to the size of their browser window. Flex Builder can do this through a simple GUI panel, but the process is a little more involved if you're using Flash CS4 Professional, which is where we'll pick things up.

It's been a while, but Adobe's announcement of Flash Platform Services for Distribution (which we'll shorten to AFPSD for the duration) begs for the not-quite-famous "fake FAQ" treatment, where your humble host asks made-up questions of, well, himself in an attempt to make further sense of the official AFPSD press release. With that as the setup, let's get to those "frequently asked questions."

One might naturally assume that a series of articles about building a Flash quiz engine may actually impart some knowledge about, oh, say, Flash. With that in mind, in this installment we're going to rectify the absence of any Flash in part one by firing up Flash and writing some ActionScript 3, with the exciting goal of loading the XML document we produced last time. Without further ado, let's dive right in.

In the first installment of a multi-part series, we’re going to begin the process of creating an XML-based quiz engine using ActionScript 3 in Adobe Flash CS4. We’ll start slowly today by figuring out what features we want to include and how those features will translate to the structure of the XML template we’ll eventually use to populate the Flash playback engine. So, to kick things off, let’s ask the obvious question: what do we want this thing to do?

In what has become something of a Macworld tradition, Roxio once again used the annual gathering of Apple faithful as the backdrop for the unveiling of version 10 of its stalwart Toast Titanium media management product. As in past years, more features have been added and the upgrade price is still terrible, but this year there's a new wrinkle. Let's dive in to see what's changed this time around.

In the spirit of the four year hiatus between versions (and accompanying uncertainty as to the dead/not dead status of the product), it's only fitting I let almost a year roll by between the announcement/release of Director 11 and finally getting around to reviewing it. In any event, Director is back from its long slumber, so let's take a look at what the eleventh release of the former king of the multimedia hill brings to the table.

Last summer I got curious. With the advent of Intel Macs, Boot Camp, and Universal builds of After Effects, for the first time it was possible to forget about all the Intel vs. PowerPC benchmarks that had been run to that point and effectively remove hardware from the equation, focusing solely on the OS and how well AE was tuned to it. XP took the prize back then, but I'm curious again, and with Mac OS X Leopard, 64-bit Vista, and After Effects CS4 at my disposal, it's time to find out where things stand today.

I have a confession to make: while I covered the initial announcement of Adobe Fireworks CS3 in the spring of last year, I never followed up with a full review. Why? Because, frankly, there wasn't much to it. It seemed like a quick port, done under duress and ultimately boasting only a thimbleful of largely forgettable features, not to mention the seemingly halfhearted attempt to give Fireworks a new purpose as a prototyping tool. The good news is that the situation couldn't be more different with the latest version of the former Macromedia stalwart, so let us count the ways.