darron schall :: application developer specializing in the flash platform

Big news today -- All of the IFBIN examples are now available as open source software! All of the examples, that is, except FlashVNC. Why?

The answer is multi-part, but the short of it is that FlashVNC has been a "dead" project of mine for longer than I care to admit. Bad Darron, I know. I don't want the code to be included with IFBIN because, well, it's busted, broken, kaput, faulty, defective, out of order, malfunctioning, etc. The last time FlashVNC was updated was to support the Beta 2 drop of FlexBuilder on labs. It may have been updated for Beta 3, but to be honest I don't really remember.

Needless to say, if you download the source and try to compile it, it's very broken and won't work in Flash Player 9 and won't build with the official release of Flex 2. I don't want people to struggle through that experience, so I thought it was best to take a different direction.

So, what's the plan then?

Well, I very much want to see FlashVNC released as open source software. In fact, I've contacted Aral about setting up a project on OSFlash, which will be the new home of FlashVNC.

I fully support IFBIN being open source and letting the community learn from the examples we've created. However, I wanted FlashVNC to live alongside my other open source projects, and I look forward to using OSFlash's Trac and Subversion support to foster a community around the project.

The plan is to update FlashVNC in two waves. The first will update the outdated codebase to support the official release of Flex so that there is finally a working binary (.swf) again. The second update involves some refactoring that I've been meaning to do but haven't had the time to devote to it. Once these are complete, I'll do an intial commit into the OSFlash Subversion repository.

In the next few weeks you can expect to see FlashVNC reborn, this time better than ever. Its fate as open source software is guaranteed, I just need to find some time to breath life back into it. Please bear with me though, my wife and I just moved, so most of my free time has been spent unpacking and getting settled in the new place.

My ultimate goal is to make FlashVNC the default VNC client for TightVNC, replacing the Java version with a Flash one. A little lofty maybe, but definitely something worth striving for...

[By the way, my ActionScript 3 Klondike implementation is not available in IFBIN anymore either. I'll be giving Klondike an overhaul as well, and will be releasing the source code once its been updated for the official release of Flex 2.]