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By now you’ve seen and heard plenty about Flash Player 10. One feature that I’m in love with right now is the new text rendering provided by Saffron 3.1. Among other things, this provides better anti-aliasing for fonts, including device fonts.

Why does this matter? Because now you can use device fonts in your TextFields, and do things like adjust their opacity, or rotate them without needing to embed the font. How sexy is that? Obviously, if you’re using a custom font, you’ll need to embed that, but for device fonts, it’s no longer a requirement just to adjust the alpha value of a TextField.

Check this out (You’ll need Flash Player 10 installed).

Download the source: AstroTest.as.

This is a really simple demo, but it’s enough to get the point across.

The last project I had the privilege of working on while at Footnote.com launched earlier today.

Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial

You can view the entire wall, and do more than just view the names of the men killed in the war - you learn about these men.

Initially, the info provided about these guys is just the basics - birth/death, military info, etc., however, as time goes on, and more content is added, you’ll be able to see photos, and read histories of these men. Much of this content will be user-contributed, by the friends and family of the men memorialized by this monument.

Working on this project was great - it was a chance to stretch my talents, and see what I could do as a Flash developer, but it also gave me a greater appreciation for the lives these men gave. I wasn’t alive during this time period, and so I can’t pretend to understand the full impact of the Vietnam War, or the impact that had on the lives of the people that lived it, but working on this project at least made a bit of history feel a bit more “real” to me.

This week is the annual Game Developers Conference, which I love, not for game announcements like we get with the other game shows, but for all the geeky developer stuff we get to see. There’s some awesome stuff coming out of the conference so far, and one of my favorites so far is the announcement of the XNA Community Games from Microsoft.
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