The Gaia panel was completely rewritten in Flex and includes optimization features, easier Gaia project management, and a new publish panel which makes developing with Gaia even easier. Gaia 3 also features a brand new version of SWFAddress (version 2.3) that fixes the Firefox 3 OSX redraw bug.

There is also a completely new addition to the Gaia project: the Gaia Framework Site Creator AIR application. This small AIR application allows you to quickly update your project's site.xml and visualize it as a wireframe sitemap.

Some of the features include XML validation, drag and drop re-ordering, reordering of asset load order, editing project properties, and printing a site map. You can download the first version from Wade Arnold's blog posting about the app.

• Refactored JavaScript implementation
• New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
• New CS4 based Splash screen sample
• New Digg API sample
• New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
• New XSS protection that doesn't affect special characters
• Support for Internet Explorer 8
• Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
• Improved title handling
• Improved unload event handling for IE
• Updated Rails sample
• Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
• Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
• Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
• Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
• Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
• Cross platform build script
• Various optimizations

This looks to be a major release, and took over seven months of development. I remember speaking to Rostislav about this release back at FOTB 2008 Brighton, so he truly has put in a lot of effort. Here's hoping it gets wrapped into the expected new Gaia release.

The new version is available for download here.

Jason and I used our experiences in building the p.i.n.k. Spirits website as a platform for testing the concepts and they worked so well that we decided to write an article. The article covers using SWFAddress and SWFObject with PHP to provide your content in an alternate view (in this case HTML instead of Flash) for SEO purposes.

The article contends that when Adobe announced they were working with Google and Yahoo! to improve the searchability of Flash and Flex websites and applications, the Flash development community largely applauded the initiative. However, months after the announcement there has been minimal increase in the effective search engine rankings of Flash and Flex websites.

We discuss why the current method of Google and Yahoo!'s new 'headless player' isn't working quite yet, and how you can provide a mirror of the exact same content in your Flash and Flex projects as HTML using a single data source. This is a 'white hat' approach and doesn't break any of Google's rules.

There have recently been some articles on how Google has been updating the 'headless player', namely this article on InsideRIA, and I may do a blog post updating the article if necessary. Until then, be sure to check out the article in the January 2009 issue of Flash & Flex Developers Magazine.

Yes, you could track events prior to this announcement by manually calling the JavaScript function embedded within the HTML page via ExternalInterface and passing it a unique identifier, but now you have two new options: either use the simple Flash or Flex component, or use the Flash or Flex AS3 tracking library. It should be noted that all four of these methods are being released as open source under the Apache 2 License.

Also, it looks like Rostislav will be looking at including this new GA library in his SWFAddress project (which already has support for tracking page views via the method I mentioned above).

The project is being hosted on Google Code where you can download the source and find documentation.

Ryan Stewart does a great job of explaining it in his blog post:

So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.

Going a bit further, Justin Everett-Church also has a good post where he explains that content producers do not have to do or change anything for their SWFs to be indexable. My guess is, however, that as developers find out what Google likes best, they'll start building with that in mind. Knowing that will be the case, this announcement could have a huge impact on frameworks such as SWFAddress and other means developers have used recently to help make content more visible to search engines.

One key thing to note is Ted Patrick's post in where he makes a point to mention that dynamic data will also be indexed in the process. Considering I build most of my projects with the content being pulled from XML or some other data source such as SWX, this is great news as well.

It seems like the only search engine company left out of the party was Microsoft. As Brooks mentions, I'd bet Microsoft is not interested in offering a service which enhances a direct competitor's platform file format to their Silverlight. It is a shame, but I doubt it will have much of an effect on the Flash community.

You can find more information on the Adobe Developer Center SWF searchability FAQ and in Google's official announcement.

Why is this so awesome? Well, with this added functionality you can now create 'chapters' in your content, without having to split up the video file. And with YouTube basically becoming a free streaming media provider with the release of their chromeless video player, the possibilities are endless.

Check out an example of the deep link, which starts the video 21 seconds in.

Rostislav goes into more detail on his blog post about the SWFAddress and YouTube API project, and you can download the sample now from the SWFAddress SVN.

Project:

p.i.n.k. Spirits website

URL:

http://www.pinkspirits.com

Synopsis:

This high-profile consumer site was built for p.i.n.k. Spirits -- a new premium liquor company which creates various liquors infused with caffeine and guarana. The best way to describe their product is your favorite liquor and RedBull, without the RedBull taste, calories, or color. The first product to launch is vodka, with gin, tequila, rum, whisky, sake and others to follow in 2008/2009.

Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):

- The site makes great use of a couple of open source tools: SWFAddress 2.0 and SWX.

- The site was almost 5 months in design and development.

- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end content database. Once again this made the creation of the CMS go much faster and communication between the site and CMS much smoother. SWX is also used for e-mail list sign-up, and I have released this service open source as part of the SWX contest.

- An extensive listing of drink recipes, events, and venues can be found on the site.

- A custom retail store and bar/restaurant locator was developed for the site, providing users with the distance from their ZIP code to the local places they can find pink's products. I may release this as a SWX service in the future.

- I contracted with The Bailey Group of Philadelphia, PA on this project, whose talented designers concepted the site and team was great to work with.

- A huge thanks goes out to Jason McCoskery, who again was a great partner in development and whose overall development knowledge in both PHP and ActionScript is always enjoyable to work with.

The long awaited update to SWFAddress has been released and is ready for download. Rostislav has been posting update notes listing new features, such as the new SEO abilities, all week leading up to the release.

New features include:

• Support for multiple Flash movies in the same HTML page and Ajax.
• Event listeners for ActionScript and JavaScript.
• New SWFAddressEvent class with support for INIT and CHANGE types.
• New unobtrusive SEO technique.
• Support for Adobe Flash CS3.
• Support for Flash Player 7 with the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit.
• Support for SWFObject 2.0, UFO and Adobe's Active Content embedding.
• New strict mode that adds trailing slashes by default.
• New helper methods for link, window and popup management.
• Ability to configure the script with query parameters.
• The swfaddress.html is optional and not used by default.
• Lots of new and improved Flash based samples.
• Various optimizations and fixes.
• API docs for ActionScript 3 and JavaScript.

Rostislav has been hard at work on this project for quite some time, and the improvements include those which were the most requested by developers. I'm also happy to have been a part of this release by helping with the documentation and an AS3/Flash CS3 sample.

I should also note that rumor has it there may be some t-shirts available to those who donate to the project and help fund future development!

So, just to be clear, the bug only affects ActionScript 2 (AVM1) websites and applications - those written in ActionScript 3 (which uses AVM2), such as Flex applications, are immune to this bug.

This was first brought to my attention through a blog post on the issue, and Rostislav was quick to research the issue and post his findings. He also submitted a bug on Adobe's website so they would be aware of the issue. I suggest if you are also experiencing problems that you submit the bug as well, as the more reports Adobe receives about a bug the faster it will get solved.

If you have any further questions, the Sourceforge email list or forums is a great resource. I also suggest reading Rostislav's blog post for more detailed information.