Flash developers have a lot more control in using and manipulating elements in Flash 8. Now you can directly manipulate bitmaps on the fly within Flash, and also control a movie clip’s transformations via its transform matrix. Here’s a long and lucid explanation of Flash 8’s transformation matrix, the Matrix class in Flash and the methods by which it manipulates matrices, and some of the math behind those operations if you’re interested.

From that master of life-hackery Tim Ferriss of all people, here’s a small tip for making a screengrab of an entire page (or any part of a page that you need). I shoulda known there was a Firefox extension.

I remember when ‘applications’ cost $40+ and were therefore something you’d spend many hours using or playing. As a student I couldn’t afford too many of them, but unit sales were in the millions.

Wikipedia:

Biodiversity is often used as a measure of the health of biological systems.

If you went out on a limb and called the iTunes App Store an ecosystem, its exploding growth and variety in all directions would qualify it as a rain forest. This point was brought home when my buddy Dave shot me this link. I share it not as an example of programming virtuosity or because everyone will want it, but because it’s the sort of ultra-specialization that occurs on the margins of an ecosystem when it is entrenched and supportive of even the ultra-niche.

This variety itself might be the ultimate killer app, the meta-attraction, the seductive sum that encourages adoption of the parts, with first-year downloads of over a billion units.

Just when you thought it was safe to leave the house again, you have another thing to worry about: Wi-Fi allergy. A British DJ claims that he is struck by dizziness, confusion, and nausea whenever he’s in range of a hotspot. Hmmm. I used to have the same reaction to office cubicles generally, but I found that distracting myself with the threat of getting fired always left me feeling much better.

Far be it from me to question the veracity of a person’s ailments, but it hardly adds up. He has a Wi-Fi detector to help him stay away from areas he should avoid, though it’s not clear to me why he’d need that if he supposedly senses it naturally. Probably the simplest argument as to why this poor guy should be diagnosed with nothing but raging hypochondria and/or admirably aggressive self-promotion comes in a comment on the Daily Mail article:

The problem with this claim is that Wi-Fi uses the 2.4 gigahertz frequency spectrum along with Bluetooth phones, cordless home phones, and just about any other consumer wireless device. If he really had an ‘allergy’ like that, he wouldn’t have been able to leave his house for the past 15 years. He should try to promote himself a different way than this.

The cynic in me can help but think that the .com for Wifiallergy will be quite a money maker when drugs are introduced to combat this ailment. Unfortunately it’s already taken. So is restlesslegsyndrome and santalives.

Has free archived video from YouTube et al. opened up your web exploration possibilities just a little? Talk about getting pulled in: sometimes I have to pour ice water over my head to get away from the endless cute puppy videos, old music videos, the wacked-out viral hits … and of course the tutorials on all the areas in which I’m knowledge-deficient because of the video watching.

It looks like I’m going to need a whole lot more ice water. Justin.tv has opened up it’s API and will serve live video for free. Of course, live webcams are old news, and most IM clients have video functionality. But we’re talking broadcast here. Between the price and Justin.tv’s crazy-easy “live broadcasting in one click” model they’ll definitely see accelerated adoption. It’s just another example of a piece of infrastructure whose usage (and market share) will be enhanced by a compelling (ie free) standard and branding. Combine it with Camtweet and you’ve got a distribution method too. All you need now is a message, and you are in business.

There’s an excellent overview of PHP frameworks from Noupe.com, that should answer most questions for beginners. The article includes short reviews of five of the top PHP frameworks. Digital Media Minute has also done posts on Zend and Symphony before if you’re interested.

Call me a contrarian, but in a week in which Microsoft reported significantly shrinking quarterly revenues, I thought it might be worthwhile to find a few articles that are optimistic about the prospects of Windows 7. It’s hard to overstate just how vital it is for Microsoft to have Windows 7 adoption be enthusiastic, or at least healthy.

Ten things you’re going to like.

It’s gonna be fast.

Apple fanboys won’t be able to tarnish this rollout.

As time goes on, the things people do with computers differentiates and fragments more and more: rapid adoption of mobile hardware, netbooks, still-increasing time spent on the internet. How many things do you do with the box that is your laptop or desktop computer, today? So many companies focus on and succeed at doing small parts of the User Experience well, and as this fragmentation continues it seems unreasonable to expect a company’s size to be an automatic recipe for success. We are so far now from simply running apps on standalone PCs, and that was the time of Microsoft’s dominance. This may be a story less about Microsoft blowing it than about the world changing.

Their server business is still strong relative to other parts of their business, but losses in their online division actually exceeded online revenues. I’m not yet clear what the Microsoft dominance that we have all taken for granted for the last 25 or so years will become. They have a huge pile of cash…

Clearly Biz Stone gets it. And what he gets isn’t just how to optimize the thing that he helped create, but how to react to the fact that Twitter’s users have redefined it.
Addressing Twitter’s future at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference, Stone said:

“We started out by creating this very simple status updating system. And that’s not what Twitter is. It evolved into something else,”

and:

“We have ongoing discussions with a lot of companies. One of the ways we look at Twitter, and the landscape in general, is not as a zero-sum game but how we can reduce a lot of friction between a lot of companies,” Stone said in an interview at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.
“In other words, we see ourselves as complementary to big social networks, to search engines, to big commercial sites,” he said.

Stone says there will be add-on services and efforts to educate users on how to make money using Twitter.

Twitter might become part of basic communications infrastructure for companies as well as people, and it might not. Either way, I’m enjoying watching Twitter management swing for the fences when they could easily opt instead to become regulars at all the hot spots in the South of France.

Update:: Here’s Twitter’s initial formal effort toward a business guide.

Digital Media Minute has done posts on how to build iPhone applications before, but Matt Gemmell has a superb quick-start ‘emergency guide’ for iPhone app development. Much more than a cheat-sheet, it’s aimed at competent programmers who have neither the time or the need to be hand-held as they learn the essentials of iPhone development.

Here’s an outstanding overview of storing static web assets using Amazon S3 online storage, why you’d want to use it, what it does not do, and a migration guide. Performance at a low price–it’s a combination that’s hard to beat.