Uniphonic has just released a new refill: Auditory Vortex - Thor Volume 1. What beter way to ring in the new year, than a new refill?

For my Flash projects, I've started using a debugger called MonsterDebugger which allows you to debug right from the browser, or if you're creating an AIR app, right from the app it self. This is great because the default Flash debugger doesn't allow you to do much if your app is embedded in a CMS (like Drupal or Joomla), or relies on some kind of server side language for input.

Ever wondered why your hard drive was so full? Ever wondered what was taking up so much space? Wouldn't it be great to have a visual representation of all of your files at once?

The best open source media player we've found, has finally been fully released (version 1.0). The VLC Media Player ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) can play just about any kind of media file you can throw at it. Even FLV files. If you're tired of not having the right codec to play video and audio files, you need to check out VLC.

For doing complex development with Flash, it can help to have a more powerful Actionscript editor than the built in Flash CS3 editor. I've been testing Flex Builder and FlashDevelop, both of which can export both Flash or Flex (Flex is Flash with a library of components built for making web applications). Both seem to have their pluses and minuses. FlashDevelop is free.

There are a multitude of free fonts out there now! How do you manage them all? How do you see them all to select one to use?

I have found this Font Viewer software from AMPsoft, to be very helpful. Plus, it's free! So it can't hurt to give it a try...

http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php

This is a nifty little application which is written in the Processing language, which allows you to draw stick figures and export them to Blender for animation.

http://screamyguy.net/sketchBoard/index.htm

There is an interesting talk on Papervision at the Blender conference:

http://river-valley.tv/conferences/blender_conference_2008/

Finally there is a way to get 3D into Flash, from Blender (or another program such as 3DsMax), with Animation! It's a tool called Cast3D.

Check out this:

http://www.rustpunk.co.za/blog/?p=10

You can download the Papervision 3D component for Flash CS3 from here:
http://code.google.com/p/papervision3d/downloads/list

I thought this was a very cool demonstration of the fluid capabilities of Blender. It shows a "magician" character, who "magically" conjures the water into different shapes: