Accessibility is an important topic, especially these times, where our technologies are allowing us to develop User Interfaces in ways never imagined before. Just yesterday we could celebrate Louis Braille’s birthday which reminded us once again how important it is to care about disabled people.

Apart from that, there’s the Secion 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act which mandates that web content maintained by the federal government must be made accessible to people with disabilities. So if you’re in the business of developing websites or applications for the government – or subinstitutions – this could be a welcome addition to your knowledge:

Macromedia released a guide to Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design which explains a lot about the accessibility implementation and technologies Flash containes.

Macromedia – Accessibility

Macromedia, err, Adobe released an interesting story explaining the history behind Flash. How it came to be. I knew beforehand that Macromedia bought the so-called FutureSplash player, however, there’s way more to it. The original Flash/FutureSplash Developer, Jonathan Gay, gives a nice insight into the evolvement of Flash

Macromedia – Showcase: History of Flash
flash, macromedia, adobe, swf, actionscript

Flash 8 introduces several new technologies which enhance and optimize it’s runtime speed, especially when dealing with loads of vectors or bitmap data.

Guy Watson, over at macromedia.com (funny, it say’s ‘Adobe (formerly macromedia) now) explains the magic and details behind these techniques, and how one can use them to increase Flash’s speed

Macromedia – Developer Center : Using Bitmap Caching in Flash

This article describes an overlooked feature in Flash8 which is called Scale-9 and basically allows you to scale object through a 3×3 grid which means that the corner won’t scale while the space between the corners will scale.

Scale-9 From Outer Space

Zinc is an application which converts Flash SWF Files (Version 6,7,8) into launchable executables (Windows EXE or Mac OS X App) and allows to add custom code, like file save or open functionality.
Basically Zinc allows you to create real Mac OS X or Windows applications which could for example execute shell-scripts, load & save text-files or capture desktop images.
Read.