So there's still no Flash in Safari, but once Adobe hatches Flash Professional CS5 you'll be able to port your wacky Flash games or animations out to real, live iPhone/iPod touch apps. Yep, ActionScript 3 nerds rejoice: that tasty App Store pie will soon be yours, never minding the whole plug-in debate.

This is truly quite awesome in one regard, as it lowers the barrier to entry for some app developers, and will ease the port of some cool online games that we've seen floating around the interwebs. Then again, if you've spent a little time at places like Newgrounds.com, you will quickly see the dark side to this announcement from Adobe. All those crummy Flash toys online just got one step closer to coming to life on the App Store (we're guessing most will sell for the low, low price of $.99). At this rate there will be more apps than iPhones!

Still, back when I taught animation and game design, we had a lot of fun playing around in Flash for the powerful prototyping capabilities, if nothing else. It would have been cool to test games on the iPhone so easily. The video on Adobe's site looks pretty cool, with them touting the "responsiveness" of apps. Yeah, unlike the slowpoke performance my kids suffer on our G4 Mac when playing Flash games, eh? I get it -- when Unity 3D for iPhone came out there were problems with performance (it has matured nicely now), and any tool that exports in this way (turning an .fla into an .ipa, essentially) is bound to suffer from performance. Does anyone else find it ironic that a plug-in that was designed to make multimedia on the web lighter has become one of the most bloated? I digress.

No word on what SDK features are supported yet, but you can sign up for the demo when the beta starts. Those SDK features could be a killer, of course. If you can't leverage some of the features on the iPhone (multi-touch, GPS, camera, etc.) these may be relegated to the Entertainment category. One other thing to note about all the CS5 applications: they will be Intel-only, Cocoa and 64-bit native.

Update: Well, lookee there, apparently some games in the store have been using this already. Did you know South Park Avatar Creator was made using Flash? Amazing.

ScreenSteps 2.6 is out, and has added two very useful features: the ability to export to Microsoft Word or Pages, and the ability to embed videos into your documents for online publication. We've covered this screen-based documentation application since its initial release, and it continues to be a personal favorite for me and an incredibly efficient way to create and maintain documentation for clients, employees and users.

The video embedding is a huge deal for my workflow. I've found through years of working with clients that a PDF or online document and a video serve two very different audiences. Some folks, myself included, have a learning style that does not work with video tutorials. We require text and examples we can scan, search and bookmark. The other half are in a reverse situation; videos jibe with their learning style, but pages of text just cause a logjam in their brains. Ultimately, because I can rarely predict the learning style of a client, I end up creating both; documenting a procedure step-by-step, and then demonstrating it while I record the screen, using the manual I just created as a script. With ScreenSteps 2.6, I can now add a shorter video to each step or lesson, allowing me to serve both audiences a little more efficiently.

Embedding video is as easy as copying the embed code from any video service which provides it, choosing the Step > Set Video Embed Code menu option and pasting your code. At this point, the "video embed" is a PR-speak way of introducing a feature which really has much more advanced possibilities. Quite simply, this feature allows you to embed anything you want, and -- at least in HTML exports -- have it interpreted within the documentation as Javascript/HTML. I plan to use this freedom to embed bookmarks in my videos using YouTube's Javascript API. You can also use it to insert code examples with HTML pre and code tags. The sky's the limit.

On to the new export formats ... I really should say format, as it's a single option to export a Office Open XML format. This format can be read by and edited in most modern word processors, including Apple's Pages and Microsoft Word. As with ScreenSteps' other export formats, users can customize templates for their OOXML files, allowing strict adherence to standards within organizations with such requirements. It allows for some pretty darn good-looking Pages documents, too.

A trial version of ScreenSteps 2.6 is available for download from Blue Mango Learning Systems. See the product page for further details. Pricing comes in two levels: $39.95US for the standard version, or $59.95US for the Pro version (which is required for the video embedding and OOXML export features). As noted by the developers in the comments, video embedding works in both Standard and Pro versions.

You've got all your iStuff inside Yojimbo (hands up who loves Yojimbo and I'll count, starting with me), but for some reason you need to get it on to another computer, perhaps one running a different OS. What to do?

This AppleScript takes your entire Yojimbo library (well, everything except the PDFs) and exports it to a Tiddlywiki that you can carry around and view on pretty much any computer.

I say "any computer" but iPhone users shouldn't get too excited just yet. Apparently, the standard Tiddlywiki doesn't display that well on an iPhone.

But, ooh, wait: what do we have here?

Thanks to Jon for the tip.

Attention all ye Facebook and iPhoto users: you may feel free to begin using iPhoto '08, now that Facebook has updated their Facebook Exporter plug-in. We first found this plug-in back in March, and while I'm definitely not the most active Facebook user or photo uploader, I don't think anything else is new. However, I just noticed a really cool feature that allows you to click anywhere on an image in the well on the right to create an outlining box around it, allowing you to name or tag whatever you're highlighting.

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto is provided for free by Facebook.

Today is apparently iPhoto export plugin day as in addition to the Facebook iPhoto plugin and updated FlickrExport plugin mentioned earlier, John Gruber at Daring Fireball brings our attention to ScriptExport from Nathaniel Gray. ScriptExport "allows you to 'export' your iPhoto pictures and movies by processing them with shell script." A script can can be done either at the start of the export, on a per item basis, or at the end of the process. He has some example scripts in the documentation. This is probably only for the command line ninjas among us (i.e. not me), but it looks like it could be very useful if you're the type that would rather type mkdir than hit Cmd + Shift + N.

ScriptExport is a free download.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Safari2OPML is a handy utility that can export your Safari RSS feeds to a fairly standard OPML, good for importing into virtually any other RSS reader. I say 'virtually' only because, in my RSS travels, not all readers digest OPMLs alike. Even Safari2OPML's page at FreeSMUG (Free OpenSource Software Mac User Group) lists some of the top readers and whether this OPML will play well with them. For bonus points, Safari2OPML works with Growl to let you know when the export is a success.

Safari2OPML is donationware and available from FreeSMUG.


[via Pimp My Safari]

QTAmateur brings a lot of the handy QuickTime Pro features to the table without having to pay the $30 upgrade. Full screen video playback (with a more streamlined, iTunes 7-like video window) and batch exporting of any format QuickTime can read and write make for a handy little app.

QTAmateur is free, Universal and available from Mike Ash, a Rogue Amoeba programmer.

Fraser Speirs already released a Flickr plugin for Aperture, but what about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users in the crowd (John Gruber has a nice piece on the ridiculousness of adding the 'Photoshop' prefix to Lightroom's name)? As it turns out, through a little trickery, Lightroom can be tweaked for uploading your images to Flickr.

This Mac OS X Hints post describes the simple setup, as well as a couple of drawbacks, to using Lightroom and the official Flickr Uploadr tool in conjunction; one simply needs to change the external editor preference to the Flickr Uploadr, then chose the Uploadr as the option from the Post-processing page during an export. Check out Mac OS X Hints though for more details and possible inspiration for asking Mr. Speirs (nicely) for a true-blue Lightroom Flickr plugin.

Fraser Speirs has updated his fantastic FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto to 2.0.1, ushering in a few key bug fixes an an API compatibility update. The specific bugs that Mr. Speirs squashed (murderer!) are the 'Waiting for Flickr' hangup the plugin could sometimes experience upon finishing an upload (I've been personally bitten by this one on occasion), as well as a nasty iPhoto crash upon upload.

You can grab the update from Fraser's update post on his Connected Flow blog, or from the main Connected Flow product page.

Thanks Nik Fletcher!

ShapeOnYou is a 3D tool for drawing and rendering basic 3D objects that can play nicely with other 3D-friendly applications like Keynote and OmniGraffle 4. It features an iWork-like inspector to give you an intuitive interface right out of the box, and it comes with over 20 shapes, as well as the ability to create your own. ShapeOnYou also supports the LinkBack framework, so if you embed a ShapeOnYou project in other LinkBack-enabled apps (such as Nisus Writer Express, Curio, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and more), the object will be updated in those apps if you make any changes from within ShapeOnYou (a genius framework, really). Finally, ShapeOnYou can export to a wide variety of formats such as PDF, EPS, SVG, VRML, X3D, TIFF, PNG and JPEG.

However, since I'm really not that versed in the realm of 3D, I'll stop pretending and just let you check ShapeOnYou out for yourself. ShapeOnYou is a Universal Binary and is available as donationware here.

If saving YouTube videos as favorites and making your own playlists online with their services isn't enough to quench your thirst for their literal flood of content, TubeSock lets you take things one step further by allowing you to save the videos and even convert them for your iPod. It's a small utility that allows you to enter a YouTube URL or simply a video ID, and it can show you a preview of the movie and offer a couple of saving and export options including H.264, PSP, audio-only and even a plain Flash FLV file. TubeSock can also install a bookmarklet in Safari for speedier delivery, and it can even send exported videos straight into iTunes to complete the ultimate YouTube-to-iPod workflow.

After playing with the demo, I'm impressed. Compression is impressively speedy, and for bonus points it automatically cleans up the Flash file it dowloads once exporting is done.

The demo is limited to exporting only the first 30 seconds of any video until you fork over the $15 registration fee. TubeSock is a Universal Binary and available from stinkbot.

[via digg]

 

Fraser Speirs announced on his personal blog today that FlickrExport 2, his fantastic iPhoto plugin for uploading to Flickr, is done and will be shipping soon. Yes, we know that since it isn't available right now, this post becomes a little less useful, but we thought y'all might appreciate hearing when a beta product has actually been announced as 'finished' (*ahem*, Google). As Fraser's original beta 2 post states, pricing for this vastly updated and improved version will be announced when the FlickrExport product page goes live with the new version. Stay tuned.

[thanks Nik Fletcher!]

FlickrExport has entered a 2.0 beta phase, ushering in some really, really cool new features including:

• FlickrExport now supports uploading to existing sets.
• Uploaded photos can be added to a group pool after upload.
• FlickrExport now displays a list of your tags used on Flickr which can be added to photos before uploading. This list can be filtered using regular expressions.
• FlickrExport can copy the title and description back to iPhoto if it has been changed inside FlickrExport. This feature is turned off by default.
• If a photo's date has been modified in iPhoto, FlickrExport now communicates this to Flickr.
• It is now possible to specify description text for a new Photoset as well as its title.

The one catch in this new version, however, is that Fraser Speirs, its developer, has decided to turn FlickrExport into shareware. While I can't find a price anywhere on the FlickrExport 2.0 beta site, I personally am not surprised, as this is a powerful plug-in that Mr. Speirs has obviously spent quite a bit of time on. I know I'll be happy to buy a license once he announces a price - but what about you, loyal FlickrExport users? Do you mind offering up some of your hard-earned cash for some of Mr. Speir's hard work?

Dave Caolo showed you an open source image editing tool, so I thought I'd pick up another end of the spectrum with an illustration tool by the name of WouldjaDraw. While it isn't open source, WouldjaDraw does have a healthy array of illustrating features and tools. Inspector palettes, gradient tools, a nice selection of export formats and a strong toolset should make WouldjaDraw a satisfying alternative to the illustration mega-suites.

A demo is available, and a license will run you a mere $29.95.

[via Daring Fireball]

MacOSXHints has a simple trick for creating an OPML file, completely with folder structure/groups, from your RSS feeds in Safari. The tip basically involves downloading an XML stylesheet the author created, and using it in a Terminal command to generate the OPML file.

I'm glad someone found a way to put this together, but with the open standards and portability of RSS and newsfeeds, I think it's kinda bad form on Apple's part to not have baked this ability into Safari already. Nevertheless, MacOSXHints has come to the rescue, yet again.