Sparkle beta is out

Probably you would've read about this by now; Microsoft has released the first public beta of Microsoft® Expression™ Interactive Designer(Sparkle). You can get it here

EWeek has already started asking if its gonna be a Flash killer!

There is a video which was released sometime in September last year, which showed some sneak peaks about the product. You can get it here

iMac on Intel Chips.

The announcement has been made - in style.

Read the complete news article here and here.

Loading crossdomain.xml file from a custom location using System.security.loadPolicyFile

This post expects the reader to have a basic familiarity about Cross domain policy and the crossdomain.xml file. If they sound alien to you, check this technote by Colin Moock

Crossdomain policy was introduced with the security restrictions in Flash player 7 (r7.0.14.0). Right then, the only place where the flash player would look for a crossdomain.xml file was the root directory. Since it was difficult for site administrators to add a crossdomain.xml file to the site root location, a update was released over Flash player 7 (r 7.0.19.0) which included a new method called 'loadPolicyFile', which basically tells the Flash player to look for a custom location, other than the default root directory.

The usage for this method is as follows:
System.security.loadPolicyFile (url:String)

You can read more about this method from Macromedia LiveDocs.

So if you are still developing Flash 7 content, and are planning to use System.security.loadPolicyFile method, make sure your users have flash player 7.0.19.0 or more.

Adobe Lightroom beta available on Labs

Adobe Lightroom beta is available for download at Adobe labs(formerly macromedia labs). Check out the introductory video here

To me, Adobe Lightroom looked like a revamped version of Adobe Photoshop album, which was launched as a free download, to join the likes of Google's Picasa. However I should say that I'vent gotten enough time to go through the video completely.Adobe says Lightroom will be a pro photographer tool. The windows version of the beta is not yet released. Only Mac download is available. I'll have to wait till windows version of the beta is available.