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Adobe’s Scott Fegette has a good tip for Flash 8 developers who publish swfs targeting earlier versions of the Flash Player (ie, <8).

Bottom line, the first thing you should do to a new fla is set the player version. Do that, and features of the IDE that aren’t supported in your target player will be disabled.

Seeing as how the Flash Asset Xtra that ships with Authorware 7 embeds the Flash Player 6 this is a ‘damned good to know’.

OT, posting this from Chicago’s O’Hare (wireless isn’t free but it’s fast).

Microsoft have released a public community technology preview (CTP) of their Expression Interactive Designer (Sparkle). Its built upon the “in pre-release” Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) so be sure to check the system requirements if you’re thinking about giving it a go.

Check out Manuel Clement’s blog for some commentary. He links to some insightful thoughts from “Jared” at mindfury.com.

I’m going to grab a beer and take a look at today’s channel9 interview with some of the Sparkle gang.

As work on the VG23 is halted while I wait out the Montreal winter I find myself turning to others’ boat projects to get my building fix vicariously. I am so grateful that there are some folks out there with some cool boat projects who take the time to blog. Here’s a small list of some of my favourites.

Building a Houseboat – Buddies Dave (”OzzyC”) and Greg are building the GT23 (a cabin cruiser) designed by the good folks at bateau.com (also designers of the VG).

I didn’t mean to but… – Tim Zim is in the midst of converting a fishing trawler into a liveaboard. Tim complains about busting rust the way I complain about sanding. And his “Lady Jane” is 90+ feet!

Ceilydh Under Construction – Evan Gatehouse and family are reconstructing a Woods Meander 40′ catamaran. Any boat project that begins with a chainsaw is okay in my books.

Waterlogged: living on a wooden ship – These folks are living aboard the MV Bowie, a 136 foot former WW II US Navy subchaser, as they renovate her. Something about life on a huge old wooden ship with a hot tub on her stern really appeals to me.

Know of any other projects that I should be following?

Yeah, so it’s not really a New Years resolution, but with today’s release of the Flash Lite 2 update for Flash on Adobe Labs I think 2006 is the year I attempt to build a Flash Lite app.

I’ve never really considered trying to develop for devices until now. I actually sat in on one of the Flash Lite sessions at Max this year and while I found it very infomative I can’t say I was eager to jump into Flash Lite development. The old Flash 4 AS syntax of Flash Lite 1.1, the limited data transfer, device inconsistencies, and those crazy memory and filesize constraints all just make it so unattractive. Obviously Flash Lite 2 won’t solve all of these but hopefully it’ll be enough to make things alot less painful. Check out Bill Perry’s Flash Lite 2.0 Preview for a good Breeze presentation on the new features.

There, now I’ve pledged to it. Hopefully this post won’t be haunting me in December…