I just read a great article explaining the use and implementation of marking menus in AS3. This may be just the kind of interface I’m looking for for my long overdue portfolio relaunch. Check it out!

Yesterday TechCrunch published an article noting that an “unofficial” google text-to-speech API had been exposed. Naturally, I jumped right on top of playing around with it. Here’s a simple little Flex application that will plug you directly into the text-to-speech API.

Update #1: Apparently translate.google.com doesn’t have a valid cross-domain policy file, so unfortunately this app won’t work through my blog. I have, however, made the source available for download so all of you crafty devs can play with it anyway.

Update #2: Apparently a policy file has been created! Now the application works! The source is still available for download.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ian Ford. I’m a Web Developer from Southern California, and I work specifically with the flash platform. I’ve decided that besides having a personal portfolio (which is in redevelopment hell right now), I should also be blogging about the flash platform and my other programmatic interests.

Presently, I’ll be commenting on issues and trends related to RIA development on the Flash Platform. In the future I hope to offer tutorials, screen casts, code releases, and commentaries and pointers on some of the smaller, more obscure issues I’ve run into working with Flash.

At the moment I’m content with the look and functionality of this blog but it is, like everything, a work in progress. Changes are likely to abound in both appearance and content.

In the mean time, what I really need is a good syntax highlighter that actually displays correctly with my theme.