Activeden (formally Flashden) has put together a rather tantalising holiday bundle

$30 gets you $399 worth of killer OOP Flash templates, a code package from GreenSock, and secureSWF. In addition, you’ll receive a 10% off voucher for any Rockable eBook.

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Mo’s Wanted is a fun little micro-site by London based agency, Twentysix where you follow the teams progress as they competitively grow facial hair for a worthy cause.

Movember is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health.

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You need Flash to view this page

Easy flip is a powerful AS3 class, which makes creating and flipping two sided movieclips, well, easy! With no code knowledge you can flip in any direction, blur, bend & sequence as many movieclips as you like. Unlike native FP10 3D, Easy Flip movieclips have no distortion, ensuring your text remains perfectly clear.

You can buy easy Flip from activeden for just $5, which includes free support.

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Pete is traveling within his colorful subconsciousness. Help him find his way! Coma is a beautiful game where you race through scene after scene of arresting encounters, solving cryptic puzzles. The soundtrack, storyline and graphics work together in perfect harmony.

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By now you have probably seen Apple’s surprisingly lacklustre HTML5 showcase (or not if you don’t want to install Safari). The demo’s have drawn criticism for the use of browser sniffing, vendor specific prefixes, reverting to the quicktime plugin on the iPhone and the use of the patent-backed H.264 video codec (part owned by Apple). Which would be fine if this was presented a tech demo, but its being promoted as a wholesale, standards compliant replacement to Flash that you can use today.

In response, Antonio Holguin has put together an alternative Flash showcase that of course, works on all browsers. While its exciting to have a competitor to Flash (Adobe really needed an accurately placed kick) Apple’s own demos show Flash is not a “old” technology and for the foreseeable future HTML5 is simply not ready for real world deployment.

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So, it turns out a Myspace page is not really cutting it any more. This dark, atmospheric environment is a genuinely original approach to what a band website can be.

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Prizes

The winner will receive 3 fully featured Flash templates courtesy of Flashscope (worth over $80):

• XML Plus advanced flash template
• Clean style premium XML flash template
• Super Scalable Multipurpose XML Flash Template

How to enter

• Comment on this post = 1 point
• Tweet this post = 5 points
• Promote this post on a Flash forum = 10 points
• Blog about this post = 15 points

The winner will be the person with the most points at the end of the contest. The twitter posting is limited to a maximum of 5 tweets per account. Forum posts are limited to one per site.

Please leave a comment with links to your posts, tweets etc so we can calculate totals.

The deadline

The contest has now closed and the winner notified.

Visit Flashscope

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10 Downing tweets is great little site which tracks all of the twitter buzz on the UK general election. If you are planing of voting today its also worth checking out the fascinating voter power index to see just how much, (or more likely, how little) your vote is worth.

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Breaking News.. pot calls kettle black

Its strange to hear Steve Jobs profess concern about a open web when everything else his company does is so militantly closed. This is the company that first put DRM into music, that won’t let your change your own battery, will tie to you to one phone carrier and will only let you install software from their store.

OK, but we are talking about the open web, not Apple’s OS…

People tend to associate Flash content with two things; video and games. Fortunately Jobs provides alternatives for both, for video he cites the H.264 codec. Which is fine, but isn’t H.264 a licensed, closed technology? so much so that the Firefox developers want nothing to do with it. Apple are also the company that have their own propriety, closed video plugin – quicktime, something Jobs appears to have forgotten all about.

As for games, Jobs mentions the 50,000 games in the App store, you know the same marketplace where you have to buy a Mac, pay a yearly license fee and pray Apple deems it worthy and does not pull it for some arbitrary reason. Ironically, a lot of those App store games are Flash ports, which otherwise could have been universally viewable on nearly every device with a internet connection.

Flash is not closed as you might think

The ActionScript 3 runtime (Tamarin) was open sourced, as was RTMP. The SWF file format has had its specification published so anyone can build a tool to output SWFs. AS3 is based on EMCAScript, XML parsing uses E4X – both open standards. The Flash IDE is easily extendible and the Flex SDK is 100% open source. Using Flex Builder, built on top of the open source Eclipse engine you can create Flash content created with open sourced tools. The plugin itself can never be 100% open sourced as it relies on licensed technologies like H.264 (Steve’s replacement to Flash video). However, as the xbox & PS3 have demonstrated its open enough to allow 3rd party companies to develop their own version of the plug-in.

There is also a huge community of Flash developers who for many years have been sharing code and helping each other out. The are many open sourced code projects (tween engines, utility classes etc ). I’m not saying that Flash is open is the strictest sense, but its not a closed as Jobs is making out and its a hell of a lot more open than the App store alternative.

A truly open web is not the preserve of one company

Any sensible vision of a open web, inludes the option to download applications made by anyone and install any plugin you want. Jobs appears to be heralding HTML5 as an exciting replacement to the “outdated”, “pc era” Flash, but really he knows its in such early development that for now its a non-starter. What he is actually saying to developers is please use our closed, tightly controlled App ecosystem so we can make money either by taking a cut of the sales price or through our iAd advertising platform.

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Apple CEO, Steve jobs has posted a extraordinary, lengthy article about his feelings towards Flash. It’s surprising that Jobs feels the need to attack another companies product this publicly. If you are a Flash developer it’s pretty grim reading, with Jobs claiming Flash is not a “modern” technology and has no place on mobile devices:

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

While he provides a number of plausible sounding reasons, it is important to note that he does not reveal his business motivations. Adobe’s Flash exporter would have meant it would have been very easy to target multiple mobile devices thus losening the Apple developer stranglehold. Flash and Air would have also posed a significant threat to the lucrative App store. Finally the fact the he throws around words like “propriety” and “openness” around with no sense of irony, means his reality distortion field is clearly cranked up to 11.

View Steve’s thoughts on Flash

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