Roughly a month after Flash 8 was released, I got my notification that the Flash 8 player is available in the form of a window on my desktop. As most of you are aware, the notification option was added in Flash 7. Advanced users can disable it, but it is pretty hidden.

I’m curious to see what this does to the adoption rate. Any guesses? Most Instant messenger applications use a similar scheme to good success, but I wonder if the average user really understands what Flash is compared to the IM client they actually engage in (There is a brand experience for IM, but not for the Flash player).

The thing that really surprised me though was that I got the message at all. Both IE and Firefox on this machine are running flash player 8,0,15,0 (I believe that is what ships with the IDE, but not positive). 8,0,22,0 is the current player but I still really only expected to see if for the 7 player. It doesn’t bother me, I’m just surprised.

About the notifier itself, I like it. It has information bulleted about what is changing that I think is a very fair and accurate description to the average user. You also get very clear choices of what to do. I’ve been incredibly pissed at the Viewpoint notifier that uses strange button names to try and trip you up a bit in the experience. For those that want more info it is available. Mostly I like the fact that it tells me that no restart is required. Overall the user if given enough info I feel to make an informed choice.

The only way to make it more usable is to make an extra button “IM son” for my mom.

I’ve just uploaded the FLA and PPT files for my “Advanced Flash Lite Development” session at Macromedia MAX. Thanks to everyone that attended. If you were at the conference but couldn’t make it to the class, I’ll be doing a breeze version for the MAX presentation library soon.

This zip file has the FLA for Flickr Flash Lite tag search, a Yahoo! Word of the day lookup, and a simple battery check application. I’ve included the PowerPoint file and word doc of instructions for using the FLAs.

MAX was really great this year. First it was enormous!! I think they said that it was over 3000 people. That doesn’t sound like much until you see the sea of chairs at the keynote. Even with the room full of seats, there was still standing room only.

I was really pleased to see that two of my Flash Lite applications were demoed in the keynote. NYC traffic was shown as B-roll in a video about the Macromedia Nokia partnership. Bill Perry also showed the Flickr tag search as his demo of the Flash 8 Mobile Emulator.

When not teaching my sessions, my time was split between being at the Yahoo! booth, and attending sessions. My favorites were the mobile track sessions. I was particularly impressed with Robert Hall’s Flash on every screen, a tour of Flash off the PC, and Macromedia XD team’s 3-hour session on mobile experience. I can’t say I completely agree with every point from the XD session, but it did give me a lot to think about. Who could ask for more from a session.

Last year I got home and immediately started working on Flash Lite. This year, I’m re-energized on Flash Lite, but I also left the conference with the device bug. I can’t wait to play with the iriver U10, the media player with one of the most interesting input styles I’ve seen (which also runs Flash Lite for its UI!). I’m also really impressed with the new Kodak easy Share One which also runs Flash, and was engineered by Greg Burch.

Want some more content for your flash applications? With newly-added crossdomain policy files you can now pull in many of our APIs and RSS feeds into your Flash content.

Below is the complete list of current servers and feeds available. There are several more coming, but if you have any special requests, let me know. For information on all developer programs at Yahoo!, be sure to check out the entire Yahoo! Developer Network.

Thanks to Mike for getting us moving on this and thanks to the 20+ Yahoo!s that have gotten the files up on all the servers!

APIs:

• api.shopping.yahoo.com - API docs
  Product search, Product Reviews, and Merchant Info
• api.search.yahoo.com - API docs
  web, news, video, audio, image and local search plus keyword extraction (very cool feature).
• upcoming.org - API docs
  Local events search. Upcoming.org is a recent Yahoo! acquisition
• flickr.com - API docs
  Photo search, upload, and tagging

RSS feeds (many are configurable)

• shopping.yahoo.com - RSS feeds listing
  Common pre-generated shopping requests
• ask.yahoo.com - RSS feed
  Recent Ask Yahoo! answers
• buzz.yahoo.com - RSS feeds listing
  Top Yahoo! searches overall and by topic
• news.yahoo.com - RSS feeds listing
  Current news by category (use the Search API for custom news search results)
• videogames.yahoo.com - Feature articles, News by game platform
  Articles about commercial gaming in general and by game system (go to platform sub-page at videogames.yahoo.com for platform code)
• picks.yahoo.com - RSS feed
  Recent Yahoo! web picks
• travel.yahoo.com - Configurable RSS feed
  ranking lists for hotels and restaurants by travel destinations (to use this, it is easiest to go to travel.yahoo.com select a destination and the type of thing you are looking for like a hotel or a restaurant and get the URL from the orange XML button)
• rss.groups.yahoo.com - Configurable RSS feed
  Recent post list by group (to use, just swap out the group name)
• weather.yahoo.com - RSS feeds Docs
  configurable weather data
• sports.yahoo.com - RSS feed listing
  sports articles by sport and by team