Not everyone had a great 2007. Take the Writers Guild of America for instance. Not one of their best years. By a long shot. Or Don Imus, Britney Spears or the NBA referees. None of these people can be said to have had a great 2007. We at The1stMovement, however, did. Our 2007 was superb. So what better occasion to debut our newsletter and to wish you an employed, racially tolerant, sane, non-mob tied and most of all, successful 2008?

Read more at http://www.the1stmovement.com/newsletter/feb2008.html

RegExp is a new native class for ActionScript 3 that lets you work with regular expressions, which are patterns that you can use to perform searches in strings and to replace text in strings. Natively supported by many programming languages, ActionScript 3.0 implements regular expressions as defined in the ECMAScript edition 3 language specification (ECMA-262). Specifically for Flash or Flex development, RegExp will most likely be useful for any data validation or search and replace any string.

For example, you would like to verify a string contains the letters "AS", you would do

The regular expression to see if a string contains the letter "AS" is /AS/ (remember the '/' before and '/' after the expression), and the above function defines a new RegExp Object and test it against a variable called sString.

There are a lot more complicated regular expression syntax, you can start from the Adobe AS3 LiveDocs here to learn more. Here's a class we made to do simple form validation for AS3:

Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds.

Some video sharing sites already started implementing the player including Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/highdef)

Event highlights include:

• 50 + presentations and panels
• Presentations from Adobe, bigspaceship.com (Joshua Hirsch), Blitz (Ivan Todorov), Hello Design (David Lai) Trailer Park (Marcelo Guerra and Jason Seigler) and others
• Pre-festival workshops
• Free ‘Get A Job’ evening event
• Parties and other networking opportunities

For event details, go to http://www.fitc.ca/hollywood, and enter "hotshop20" to get 20% off

As expected, at the Adobe Max Event in Chicago, Adobe launched a Beta 2 release of their AIR application, along  with many good looking AIR apps including:

• Adobe Media Player - a slick online/offline Flash video player
• eBay Destkop - the long awaited "San Dimas" eBay Desktop app

and more here