gHacks technology news » flash

Mozilla Flash Upgrade Statistics

Martin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:31:34 +0000

The Mozilla development team announced earlier that month that they would check the Flash version of Firefox users after each upgrade to inform users about security issues if they were not running the latest version of Adobe Flash. They estimated that more than 80% of all Firefox users would run an outdated – and thus vulnerable – version of Adobe Flash.

First statistics are now in and they do look impressive. On a global scale more than 10 million Firefox users have clicked on the Flash update link posted on the What’s new page shown after Firefox updates in one week. The Mozilla developers have published a graph displaying the overall page traffic, the amount of Firefox users with and without the latest Flash version and the click through rate of those without.

The graph shows that about half of the users who accessed that page in the first week had an outdated version of the Adobe Flash player. Between 27% and 40% of these users clicked on the link that lead them to the Adobe page to update their Flash player. This does on the other hand mean that the majority did not click on the link to update Flash which indicates that there might be room for presentation improvements to get more users to click on that link.

Users who want to test their Flash version can head over to the Adobe website to do so.

Mozilla Checks Flash Version After Firefox Updates

Martin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:10:05 +0000

Web browser attacks are an increasing threat these days. Attackers not only expoit web browser vulnerabilities but also those of plugins and add-ons that are installed in the web browser. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the high priority targets of attackers due to its distribution percentage. A recent article at H-Online estimates that about 80% of web surfers use an outdated version of Adobe Flash which can have a severe impact on system stability and security.

That’s where the Mozilla developers began thinking about solutions for this problem. They quickly came up with the solution to test the version of the Adobe Flash plugin after Firefox updates. Regular Firefox users know that Firefox will open a what’s new page after an update. This what’s new page will contain the Adobe Flash version check.

Firefox users with an outdated version of Adobe Flash will receive the notification that it is outdated. This information contains a link that is directly pointing to the latest version of Adobe Flash at the Adobe website. Hopes are that many users who are running an outdated version of Flash will visit the Adobe website after a Firefox update to download the latest version of Adobe Flash to install it on their computer system.

Users who want to try the Flash check right now can visit the upcoming what’s new page for Firefox 3.5.3.

Tags: adobe flash, firefox, firefox security, firefox-update, flash, flash security, flash update, mozilla-firefox

Installing Flash in Ubuntu 9.04 with Firefox

Jack Wallen — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:54:32 +0000

If you’ve spent enough time over the years with Linux you know that the browser plug-in has been a source of agony for many. When plugins first became a necessity for browsing Linux was at an “early” age and adding these plugins was truly a nightmare.

That was then, this is now. During my first trials with Ubuntu 9.04 I discovered just how far the installation of browser plugins has come. This article will illustrate to you this fact.

Ideally, of course, the distribution would ship with all of the necessary plugins installed. By default there are a number of plugins already for you:

Demo Print
DivX
Quicktime
VLC (handles many media formats)
Windows Media Player

But the number one plugin is still missing. Why? The reason for flash missing is because there are actually three different flash plugins you can install. One is the official Adobe plugin and the other two are open source versions. Although I am a big supporter of open source software, both open source flash plugins are still in their infancy and are not yet up to par with the official version. I made the mistake of installing one of the open source versions and had to uninstall so I could get the official version.

How to install

As is typical for Linux, there are a number of ways to install the flash plugin. You can download the plugin from the Adobe site. You could open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

You could open up Synaptic (Add/Remove Software utility) and search for adobe and select “flashplugin-installer”.

Or you could browse to a web site that requires Flash.

The latter is the easiest and reliable.

Figure 1

When you go to a site that requires flash you will see a bar appear with a button on the right side labeled “Install Missing Plugins” (see Figure 1). Click that button and a new window will open (see Figure 2). This new window asks you to choose which flash player you want to install. There are three choices:

Figure 2

Swfdec: The GNOME version of the flash player
Adobe Flash Player: Official version
Gnash: GNU SWF player

Choose the Adobe version and click Next. You will then be warned that the Adobe Flash Player will download and install another application. This is okay. You will be required to enter your user password to continue.

Once the installation has finished you will need to click the Finish button.

Check the installation

After the installation is complete you can check it by opening up the plugins page. Do this by typing about:plugins in the address bar. In this page you will see all installed plugins listed. The first one listed should be the most recently installed, which will be flash.

Using this method does not require you to restart Firefox. You have completed the process of installing the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox.

Final thoughts

If you have any history with Linux then you know how much of a relief it is to be able to install browser plugins so easily. If you have any interest in using the open source version of these plugins, give them a try. You can uninstall them by looking at the about:plugins page to know which version you have installed. When you know which plugin you have installed search for it in Synaptic and remove it. Once removed you can go through the process of installing through Firefox again.

Tags: flash, flash plugin, Linux, Synaptic

Adobe Flash Security Scan

Martin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:01:20 +0000

While Adobe Flash offers many exciting possibilities to web developers and users alike it also introduces several additional security risks to computer systems. We already discussed the impact of so called Flash Cookies which are able to track a user even if he deletes the normal cookies regularly across multiple web browsers.

The HP Security Laboratory has created the application SWF Scan which can be used by both developers and end users to analyse Adobe Flash files for more than 60 vulnerabilities. Usage is pretty simple and straightforward although interpretation of the findings might require a deeper understanding of Adobe Flash or extensive research on the Internet. The application works with both local Adobe Flash files or those embedded in websites.

Users will first have to find out the direct url to the embedded flash file on the website. All web browser provide those capabilities. Firefox users for instance right-click the page and select Page Info from the context menu to get a list of objects that are embedded in the website. A click on the Media tab and a manual search for files of the type embed should be enough to find the url of the Adobe Flash file. A right-click on the flash object will open a menu with the option to copy the url to the clipboard.

Once the url has been copied to the clipboard it can be pasted into the interface of the HP SWF Scan application. A click on the get button next to the url bar will initiate a connection attempt of the Adobe Flash security scanner. If the file is a valid Adobe Flash file it will automatically try to decompile it displaying the findings in the sidebar and the actual source in the right window.

A proficient Flash user can now analyze the code on his own. Everyone else is better of clicking on the Analyze button in the header of the security program. This will analyze the decompiled source code and provide a summary to the user.

The summary contains a list of vulnerabilities that have been found in the Adobe Flash file. This vulnerabilities mean that the Flash file might be vulnerable to certain exploits. Flash developers can then rewrite part of their application to fix the discovered vulnerabilities. End users on the other hand may be delighted to know that an Adobe Flash file does not contain any of the known vulnerabilities.

SWF Scan is a free download after a mandatory registration at the HP website. It is currently only available for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Tags: adobe flash, adobe flash security, flash, flash security, hp, hp security, hp software, security-scan, swf scan, windows software

Installing Firefox and Flash From Source

Jack Wallen — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:39:41 +0000

Normally you will hear me professing to always install using your Linux distributions’ package management system. This is true for most cases. There is one case, however, that defies that philosophy: Installing Firefox. I have, on many occasions, installed Firefox using the distributions package management system only to have issue with either plugins or updates. Because of this, one of the first things I do after a fresh installation is install Firefox from source. This gives you more control over the application which will ensure things run much more smoothly.

Naturally the first thing you will need to do is to download the Firefox source. Once the source is downloaded you have a choice to make. You can install Firefox for each user on the system (if there is only one user you don’t really have much to worry about) or you can install Firefox “system wide”. If you choose to install for just one user then place the source file in the users home directory. If you want to install it “system wide” move the file to the /opt directory (you will have to have root permissions or use sudo to do this.)

Now that the file is in place it is time to unpack the file. More than likely the source package will be in bunzip2 format. To unpack the file you will issue the command bunzip2 firefox-XXX.tar.bz2. (Where XXX this the release number you downloaded.) Once bunzip2 has done its thing you will be left with a tar file firefox-XXX.tar (Again where XXX is the release number.)

When you unpack the Firefox tar file a new directory will be created called simply firefox. This new directory contains everything Firefox needs to run. All you have to do now is issue the command ~/firefox/firefox to start up the browser.

Starting Firefox

Naturally you don’t want to have to start Firefox from command line every time you want to run the browser. What you will want to do is edit the preferences in either your menu entries or the Firefox application icons on either your Panel or your desktop. When you do edit the preferences you will want to change the command entry. The entry that came with the pre-installed Firefox will most likely be:

firefox %u

You will to change that to:

~/firefox/firefox %u

Installing Flash

Once you have Firefox up and running you can install plugins manually. For instance, installing the Macromedia Flash plugin involves downloading the Flash plugin, (download the source, not the binary) unpacking the file with the command: tar xvzf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz, change into the newly created directory with the command cd install_flash_player_10, issue the command ./flashplayer-installer, and answer the necessary questions. When you are asked where the installation directory is you will enter ~/firefox.

You’re done. Now you can fire up Firefox and enter about:plugins to make sure the flash player plugin is installed (it will also tell you which flash version you are using.)

Final Thoughts

It may not be the easiest method of installation, but it’s the best when you want to have more control over your web browser. You will also find it much easier to keep up to date with both the browser itself as well as the plugins you install.

Tags: bunzip2, firefox, flash, flash plugin, Linux, source, tar

Private Browsing Not So Private After All

Martin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:27:04 +0000

The last year or so has been filled with announcements about private browsing. Each web browser developer implemented or announced plans to add private browsing to their web browser. Private browsing usually means to offer a sandboxed browsing session in computer memory with no information written and stored on the computer’s hard drive. Privacy is one of the biggest buzz words around and will continue to grow in popularity in 2009. The public understanding of private browsing might differ from what private browsing actually does. It definitely does not add privacy to anything that is happening remotely on the Internet. The only gain of private browsing is an increase of privacy in the local environment.

This may however be not the only problem associated with private browsing. A recent paper by security researcher Kate McKinley confirms deficiencies in all web browsers and especially in Apple’s Safari. Not only normal cookie and data handling was tested but also plugin related handling of Flash and Google Gears data. The surprising result was that no browser passed all private browsing tests.

In fact, all of the existing private browsing modes have some form of data which is not cleared when users enter or leave private browsing modes. Although Chrome cleared the only tested type of data it stored, it was surprising to find that Gears data was not cleared, since Gears is included in the browser. However, this behavior is consistent across all browsers tested, as we will see later.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 clears cookies and session storage properly, but the persistent storage (window.globalStorage) is preserved between a normal and private browsing session.With IE 8 (Beta 2), both cookies and session storage were cleared properly, however the IE user Data stores were not cleared between the normal and private browsing sessions.

Safari on Windows fared the worst of all in these tests with respect to private browsing, and did not clear any data at all, either before entering or after exiting the private mode. On OSX, Safari’s behavior was quirky; in no case was the HTML 5 database storage cleared before or after private browsing. Previously set cookies seem to continue to be available if the user entered a private browsing session, but if the user started the browser and went directly into private browsing, it seemed to behave as expected.

All browsers have troubles with Flash Cookies and their private browsing modes. This is largely due to the way Flash Cookies are created and stored (without user interaction and means to display warnings). So what’s the conclusion in this matter? Users who like to use the private browsing mode should not use Apple’s Safari in its current stage. They should also make sure to either disable Flash and other third party plugins or use settings that prevent them from acting automatically (for example by using NoScript in Firefox).

Check out the Flash Cookies Explained article if you want to read up on Flash Cookies and find out where they are stored and how they can be deleted from a computer system.

Tags: flash, flash cookies, google chrome, internet privacy, internet-explorer, mozilla-firefox, privacy, private browsing, safari, web browser

Delete Flash Cookies

Martin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:40:21 +0000

Flash Cookies, or Local Shared Objects, are stored on the user system by Macromedia Flash applications. They function a lot like cookies and can be used to store session information or save a game progress. The real problem that many users have with them is that they do not know that they exist because they are not stored in the same directory as the normal browser cookies.

Adobe is providing a website with options to change Flash Cookie behavior. Users can change the storage space – default 100K – or deny access to Flash Cookies to websites that they have already visited.

It’s not a practical solution though. Objection on the other hand is a Firefox add-on that is giving access to the Flash Cookies right in the browser. It is not possible to change settings with the add-on but it provides an easy way to delete selected (or all) Flash Cookies.

The add-on provides an automatic search to find the location of the Local Shared Objects Folder on the system. It was not able to detect mine and I had to manually add it by browsing to the correct location. According to Wikipedia Flash Cookies are located in..

Windows: LSO files are stored typically with a “.SOL” extension, within each user’s Application Data directory, under Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects.
Mac OS X: For Web sites, ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player. For AIR Applications, ~/Library/Preferences/[package name (ID) of your app].
GNU-Linux: ~/.macromedia

All Flash Cookies stored on the system are displayed once the folder has been correctly identified. A click on a Flash Cookie displays its contents. The user has the option to delete selected Flash Cookies only or all of them in one go.

Tags: firefox, firefox-add on, flash, flash cookies, local shared objects, macromedia flash

Aviary

joshua — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:27:58 +0000

In a post last week I talked about the growth of cloud computing and web based applications in relation to online desktops. Today I’ve got some amazing flash powered online tools to show you.

Aviary is a suite of web based creative tools. Each of the tools has been named after some kind of bird, so you’ll have to get used to nearly 20 names like “Phoenix”, “Hawk” and “Raven”.

All of our tools are based right in your browser or as downloadable AIR applications. Our tools all communicate and relate to each other. To illustrate an example: You can import a swatch from Toucan into Phoenix, while doing complex bitmap processing of a 3D object developed in Hummingbird. Finally, you can take your finished artwork and lay it out in Owl as the DVD artwork for a music CD you and your friends put together in Roc and Myna and offer it for sale in our marketplace, Hawk.

Aviary is still very much under development and is strictly in invitation only beta. You can however sign up with the early “early bird invitations” form and specify what type of tools interest you, such as “image editing” or “desktop publishing”.

I actually have no idea how many of these tools are actually completed or at what stage the project is at. I have received an invite to two, “Phoenix” and “Peacock”, an image editor and pattern generator.

All I can say is that these applications are fantastic. They run from the web but act exactly like desktop software. It loaded fast and I experienced no lags or anything to indicate this wasn’t just a normal program running on my computer. Phoenix is fantastic program and almost matches Photoshop for functionality. In fact some of the example images produced are completely comparable to those produced by the commercial application.

When you receive your invitation you’ll get a user account which provides you with a dashboard and a place to save, store and showcase what you have created and a central place you can access all your applications from.

Tags: applications, creative, editing, flash, image, suite

New Information about latest Flash Vulnerability

Martin — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:05:30 +0000

A report about a new Flash vulnerability that affected the latest two versions of Adobe Flash was spreading like fire on the Internet yesterday. The Flash Vulnerability was used on specially prepared websites that would exploit the vulnerability to download information and install additional malicious software.

Research however has shown that the latest Adobe Flash version 9.0.124.0 is not vulnerable unless it’s the standalone version on Linux. That means that Windows (and Macintosh) users who have the latest Flash version installed are not vulnerable to the exploit and that Linux users should make sure that they are not running the standalone version of Adobe Flash. Windows users are only vulnerable if they are not running the latest version of Adobe Flash but version 9.0.115.0 of the application.

The latest version of Adobe Flash can be downloaded at the official website. The exploited vulnerability was fixed by Adobe on April, 8 2008 and a detailed report is available here.

Tags: adobe flash, flash

Vulnerabilities in latest Flash version

Martin — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:44:12 +0000

A recent vulnerability in the latest Adobe Flash version lead to a massive attack. More than 220000 pages on the Internet have been hacked most likely with an automated tool using a SQL injection attack. Those pages, some of well respected companies such as Nokia but also many non-profit organizations and town websites, redirect the user to websites that host the exploits for the Flash vulnerability.

If the system meets the requirements the exploit is used to download and execute trojans that steal information and droppers that download additional trojans. Information that are stolen are for example World of Warcraft account information while the droppers download files that add the computer to a botnet. (according to Trendmicro)

Most antivirus companies have already updated their software to disable the possibility that this exploit can be used on the computer the software is running on. Your best bet if you do not use antivirus software is to either disable Flash for now or use an extension like NoScript to block Flash on every domain but trusted ones.

Tags: adobe flash, flash, flash vulnerability, world-of-warcraft

Adobe buzzword – The new kid on the block

Daniel Pataki — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:37:25 +0000

After such word processing giants as Google Docs and Zoho Writer, is there room for another one? The answer has to be a definite yes, I think there is always room for anything new, but let’s see if Adobe’s fancy-pants buzzword delivers the goods.

First of all, yes, it does look awesome. It uses the clever contrast of gray and white, with pastel colors in the titles and so on to give you a beautiful look that you will most likely praise, but I doubt that looks is what we need with a good word processor.

The first sentence you are greeted with in the intro document is “The first real web based word processor”. I quickly raised my eyebrows here, I had no idea that I was using non-existent online word processing in the form of Google Docs until now. While I appreciate hype, this is a bit too far to go I think. Join me in the quest to determine if Buzzword is really all it looks to be!

The underlying engine of Buzzword is of course flash. This is not a huge surprise, since we are talking about an Adobe product essentially. It’s also not a surprise that due to this, the word processor really does look very sleek. From fades, to the way the ruler can be pulled out, it’s all made perfectly, especially the menu, which is sort of like the ribbon in Office 2007. By the way, the menu is built up in a really logical way, with unobtrusive pop-up help, a joy to work with, really. Once everything is loaded, it is lightning quick though, but you do need to load each new document. For some older PC’s and lap tops, all the fancy animation may be a bit much.

Editing documents is super easy, very intuitive and overall full of great features that are not offered by Google Docs for example. You can easily insert a table here, endnotes, comments, links, headers, footers, special characters and so on. One of the greatest features here is the ability to assign comments to highlighted areas. It works very much the same way as it does in Office, and you can turn them on and off in an instant.

The app has a great status bar, showing you some relevant info about your document. To the left it shows you the author of the document, and the button to enable you to share it with others. To the right you have a tab for viewing editing history, a very useful way to track changes made by many people. Next to that are the two most useful indicators in my opinion, word count, and the somewhat unique flag count. This counts all words that are underlined by the software for some reason or the other. This essentially means spelling-error count, and if you are working in a team it is great to check your own, or other peoples’ work. There is also a zoom feature which works in real time beautifully, and an offline/online indicator.

It would be nice to have offline features, perhaps using Google Gears, but no luck yet.Buzzword is still work in progress, so I am sure they will implement this later on. Until then you can save your documents right onto your desktop from the Save menu.

Overall this is a great piece of software. When I sat down to write this I was skeptical, I was trying it as I went along. My initial view was that this has got to be only eye candy, it can’t look this good and actually be usable, but I was wrong. I was desperately trying to find something wrong apart from it may be slow on older systems and it has no offline mode, but I really can’t. Yes, it could have more advanced features, but it still equals and beats most competitors. An awesome product, worth trying and using, I am switching right now.

Tags: adobe, flash, word processing

USB Flash Drive with Capacity Meter

Martin — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:07:00 +0000

Many users think that usb flash drives are all the same. They look boring and can only be used to plug them into a usb port. The Lexar usb flash drive Jumpdrive Mercury adds one useful function to the usb drive.

The capacity of the usb drive is shown on the surface of the usb drive making it very easy to monitor the available storage capacity of the usb drive. I only got an usb drive that is not showing it’s available capacity making it hard to judge if the free space on the device is sufficient to copy all the needed files on it.

The capacity is shown on a ten bar capacity meter which equals the storage capacity percentage of the drive. The available storage is displayed even if the usb drive is not connected to a computer. The usb drives come with a capacity of either one or two gigabytes and look very stylish.

Lexarmedia Jumpdrive Mercury

Tags: capacity meter, flash, jumpdrive mercury, lexarmedia, memory, usb, usb drive

Extract Flash Files from Browser Cache

Martin — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:37:53 +0000

Whenever I want to save a flash file, like a game or animation that I have been playing / watching, I have to go to the cache folder of Firefox and search for a file with the right extension and size. This is a lot of work if you have either a large cache or want to extract many flash files at once.

A far easier method would be to use the freeware Movie Extractor Scout lite. The Movie Extractor Scout scans the cache of Opera, Internet Explorer and Firefox automatically and create a list of all the flash files that it finds in there. You may watch them once the list has been created, grab the download link or add them to your favorites which means that the file is saved to another place on your hard drive.

You may wonder how you can get those flash files into your cache in the first place. This is really easy, just visit the website and view or play. The file will be automatically transferred to your cache. Some multi file games might not work with Movie Extractor Scout lite but most single ones do.

The developers website has a tutorial on how to create executable files from swf (the flash files) which is great if you want the application to be standalone. (sending to a friend for instance).

Tags: cache, exe, extract-flash, flash, macromedia, save-flash, shockwave, swf

ShowMeDo Free Video Tutorial Website

Martin — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 08:27:42 +0000

ShowMeDo is a relatively new website that is about videos by the people, for the people as they put it. Not the normal type of videos that you find on sites like youtube but videos that teach the viewer. The site currently has seven categories where movies are located, those are Python, Java, Ruby, Linux, Blender, Screencasting and Other. The biggest category is the Other category which will most likely be the most interesting category for everyone who is not into programming, linux and 3d.

I know that you would like some examples of videos that you can find at ShowMeDo, here we go. I pick three random ones: Getting Started with Wordpress, Basic Car Maintenance and The Perfect Cup of Coffee, As you can see they offer tech related video tutorials and “real-life” tutorials as well. Playing a video works the same way as in youtube, just click the link, the video loads and you press play in the video to start it. If youtube works for you ShowMeDo will as well.

As I said earlier it is a relatively new website which means that they do not have millions of videos. It also takes a longer time for the users to create tutorial videos as you can imagine. The ShowMeDo wiki has a (written) tutorial that explains in detail how to create videos that can be uploaded to ShowMeDo, why not share your knowledge if you are good at something ?

You may request tutorials about a certain subject. Users can vote which request is of interest to them. This is a nice feature, really nice. You still need someone to pick up your request so don’t start with something like theory of relativity. I suppose basic stuff works best here.

If ShowMeDo manages to gain some momentum and exposure on the internet they surely will make they way as a great niche movie website that is able to survive amongst the big players.

found at donationcoder

Tags: clip, flash, Linux, perl, python, screencasting, showmedo, teach, tutorial, video

Some Games for the evening

Martin — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 19:24:59 +0000

I found some great (online) games today that I would like to pass on. The first is connected to Star Wars. I know you like Star Wars. I always thought why the Imperium was that stupid to construct the Death Star the way they did. A defense shield that was guarded by nothing at all, just some silly stormtroopers. A planet shattering canon and a tiny hole that made the whole thing vulnerable.

Death Star Designer is your change to make it better. Create the meanest Death Star of them all for the Emperor. You receive lots of credits and have to make all the choices. Install Defense systems, firepower, naval facilities and much more. Just make sure you stay in the limit or the Emperor will not be pleased. Once you are done your design is reviewed and you will face criticism about all the design flaws of your Death Star. You may then redesign the Death Star or submit the design anyway.

The second game is called Tower Defense. Buy and Upgrade Towers that attack the waves of monsters that try to storm your castle and kill your citizens. You receive money for every monster that your towers kill and you can use the money to build new towers or upgrade existing ones to make them stronger. Great game, lots of fun.

The second game was recommend by a veteran reader of my blog, Thinker. It is also a Tower Defense game, this time in the well known Starcraft universe. Instead of building towers you build structures known from the game to beat waves of enemies that try to destroy your hive. Yeah that’s right, you play the Zerg. A bit more complicated than the first Tower Defense game but still lots of fun.

Tags: blizzard, death-star, death-star-designer, flash, freeware, Games, online, shockwave, star-wars, starcraft, tower-defense

Game for the Weekend 3 iSketch

Martin — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:00:52 +0000

I know that this is the second online game of the weekend in a row but this is just to much fun, and that’s what games should be all about fun. iSketch is an online multiplayer game. One person sketches a word and the others have to guess what it is. The first one to guess right gets the most points and the others have 20 seconds to guess it as well before time runs up. If they guess it as well they are awarded lesser points than the first person.

The word in question is not shown of course in the chat, all other invalid guesses are. You get some fine tools to draw the word(s) like different colors, a spray can, pencil and so on. Could be that this thing is more powerful than paint. Most rooms that are available are English rooms but you also find German, Spanish, French and custom ones.

The game features several modes, the most popular one to draw one word but there are variations of that mode were players may have to draw more than one word or have only five sketches to draw it. Games have a difficulty rating (easy, normal and expert) and can be themed as well. You may join themed channels like Christmas, Poker or Cartoons if you like.

The game has a huge user base. More than 1500 were connected to the game just a few minutes ago while I was checking it out. Game rooms have normally a limit of ten players but sometimes you find more than that amount in a room. This means that not everyone is going to sketch a word but all are able to take part and guess them.

Tags: adobe, flash, fun, game, game-for-the-weekend, isketch, multiplayer, online, shockwave, sketch

Linerider has been updated

Martin — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 08:37:20 +0000

LineRider is not really a game but a piece of art. I wrote an article about it just a month ago ( linerider ) and would like to take the opportunity to write about the changes since then. Line Rider gives you some basic drawing tools and a unlimited workspace at hand. The first phase is the drawing phase. You draw lines on the screen, lines that are somehow connected. The second phase is the playback phase. A Linerider, better a guy on a slade, falls out of nothing from the sky at the exact position you drew the first line.

He then races along the lines that you have been drawing to finally meet the end of a line or fall of the slade. Line Rider had a big community who liked the challenge and created some stunning works with the tools at hand. The biggest problem with the old version was the missing eraser, if you made a mistake you had to start all over again, no second chance.

The new version of LineRider adds an eraser, an accelerator to speed up the slade, a zoom function and a reverse line option. Take a look at the movies section on the new Linerider website to get an impression of what can be done using those simple tools. My old article had some videos as well in it.

Tags: art, flash, fun, game, line rider, linerider, shockwave, video

Fight Man

Martin — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:00:38 +0000

We all know and love those stickman animations that started to show up some years ago. There have been some incredibly works of art and I bet that many watchers thought that it would be really cool to play a stick man game instead of just watch the animation. Their prayers have been heard: This weeks game for the weekend is called Fight man and is a game like Double Dragon, only with stickman.

Fight Man is a flash game, you can play it in your browser. You may modify controls before it starts or jump right into the action if you like. Default keys are Z for boxing, X for jumping and C for a roundhouse kick that gets rid of the nearest opponents to catch you breath. Use the cursor keys for moving your char around.

The bad boys are of course in an advantage, you always face four or five of them all the time and some enter the stage with weapons like sticks. It’s fun to play and well made for a flash game, if you have some spare time check it out.

Tags: arcade, boxing, double-dragon, Entertainment, fight-man, fightman, flash, fun, game, shockwave, stickman

Animation Titanic in 30 Seconds

Martin — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 10:19:10 +0000

Found this funny titanic movie parody in flash. Oh, one more thing, its re-enacted by bunnies. Enjoy the clip, head over to angryalien.com

Tags: bunnies, Cool, flash, fun, titanic

Great Flash animations

Martin — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 14:30:06 +0000

This are animations made by artists who actually draw their “paintings” on the web using this flash site. You can see the exact strokes from the beginning up to the final picture. The quality of the pictures is amazing.

Make sure you check this great site out click fcmx.net to go there right now.

Tags: animations, flash, flash animations

gHacks technology news » flash

Mozilla Flash Upgrade Statistics

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Mozilla Checks Flash Version After Firefox Updates

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Installing Flash in Ubuntu 9.04 with Firefox

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Adobe Flash Security Scan

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Installing Firefox and Flash From Source

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Private Browsing Not So Private After All

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Delete Flash Cookies

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Aviary

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New Information about latest Flash Vulnerability

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Vulnerabilities in latest Flash version

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Adobe buzzword – The new kid on the block

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USB Flash Drive with Capacity Meter

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Extract Flash Files from Browser Cache

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ShowMeDo Free Video Tutorial Website

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Some Games for the evening

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Game for the Weekend 3 iSketch

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Linerider has been updated

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Fight Man

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Animation Titanic in 30 Seconds

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Great Flash animations

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