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It seems that, according to c|net, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated Eolas's patent claim that threatened how Microsoft's Internet Explorer handled plugins like Flash. This isn't a complete victory yet. Eolas still has 60 days to respond and there are more steps to be taken for this threat (a nightmare for all Flash developers) to be neutralized.

In other internetnews.com news, in AOL Eyes Enterprise, Mobile IM Growth there's mention of Macromedia developing for AOL:

[AOL] also recently signed a agreement to allow Macromedia to develop IM tools for its platform.

This presumably with via Central as, Daniel Dura points out, reflects an announcement made in Novemeber.

internetnews.com posted an article today, Richer Clients a Must for Web Services, which has a small mention of Macromedia's Flex and how it can "run and execute applications within Macromedia's client-side Flash environment." The main intent of the article seems to be based around the importance of rich clients - fairly interesting read.

PC World is reporting that XP's next Service Pack (SP2) may break existing applications. SP2 is a big security fix. Some of these fixes change defaults and behaviors that can cause existing Windows XP applications to no longer work properly.

The release of SP2 (arstechnica.com) is set at mid 2004 and, acording to PC World the article, "Compatibility issues should not hold back its release, Goodhew says. 'We're aiming to release SP2 midyear. As far as we stand, we're still on track to do that,' he says." No word on whether or not any Macromedia products will be effected.

Mike Chambers recently noted that [Macromedia has] released all of the source FLAs from the movies from [their] Flash Video gallery. You may or may have not seen the Video gallary before. If not, now's your chance to and should you be so inclined, also get the source files. If you want, you can learn more about Flash Video in Flash MX 2004 in the updated Video Resources center over at Macromedia.com.

This is very exciting news I would have to say. It seems Macromedia is looking to improve compatibility of Flash MX with WINE under the Linux Operating System which, as c|net is reported, will eventually lead to Macromedia products for Linux? The article quotes Macromedia's Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch:

"What we've been investigating is, When will it be time to bring our tools to Linux?" Lynch said. "I think it might be happening now."

Now, at this point, nothing is concrete, but its looking promising for the linux community. Both Flash and Dreamweaver would be very strong products for Linux as their are currently no real competitive alternatives for that platform.

Update: For those interested, here is a petition for Flash on Linux provided by dream.in.code and this is one from Petition Online (which is for both Macromedia and Adobe products). Also, don't forget Macromedia's own Feature Request and Bug Report Form.

FlashPACK is a free batch compression utility by Berg Software that enables you to easily compress multiple SWF files up to 70%.

Thanks to eyezberg for pointing this out on kirupaforum.com.

Here's another tid-bit I missed from late last month while the site was on the fritz. This concerns Macromedia's latest big venture Flex (aka Royale). According to CRN, it seems that Flex is on track to ship this spring. From the article:

The XML-based multimedia tool, which entered beta testing in November, aims to give high-end and mainstream corporate developers and solution providers a familiar programming model and environment for developing rich Internet client applications that consume Web services. For instance, the platform runs J2EE and .Net applications, and developers can use any IDE or text editor, such as Jbuilder or Eclipse. The Flex runtime uses Macromedia's Flash player, which according to research firm NPD Group has more than 500 million users.

San Francisco-based Macromedia also is developing an easier-to-use visual designer, code-named Brady, that's built on top of the company's Dreamweaver platform and is designed to "give to XML what Dreamweaver gave to HTML," Mendels said.

Seems to be quite exciting stuff. Of course the real test of usefulness will be seen its release.

One of the more anticipated Flash events of the year, Flash Forward 2004 has started today. Flash Forward is a Flash film festival that is being held in San Francisco from today March 3^rd through to March 5^th. This is the 11^th Flash Forward and the largest Flash conference in the world. Be sure to check your local Flash idols' blogs for updates. I, myself, however, did not attend. So sadly you'll get nothing more out of me about it - no photos - no stories about meeting those other influential members of the Flash community - no nothing. Maybe some pouting and remorse, but thats it.

Macromedia's "occasionally connected" Flash-based application browser Central, as c|net reports, hasn't been doing as well as some of us might have suspected. Application development seems poor and slow going. As the artical states:

So far, only a handful of applications have been released for Central, a framework for allowing Flash applications to run outside a Web browser. Downloads of the Central player, available in a "developer beta" version since last fall, appear to be minimal, and Flash developers that CNET News.com spoke to showed little interest in Central.

I can't say I expected any more than what's been seen so far. Central seems to me more like a developer playground than anything else - something many developers may not have the time or efforts available to do anything substatial for it.