News.com ran an article on Central, this morning a large section of which is a rehash of Jesse Ezell’s previous pronouncements that “Central is failing”. Not much new information is brought up in the article, although this did catch my eye: Macromedia hasn’t done enough to establish the benefits of Central to justify the cost of developing for it. Well, I agree nearly 100% with that. We are building out the platform which is something that is going to take some time.

The single most requested feature for Central has been File I/O support. So, how would you want File I/O implemented in Central? What would you use it for? What features / abilities do you want? How would you rank the following in order of importance / usefulness? (A) Uploading/downloading files from a server. (B) Having a folder on the user’s computer where apps could save or open files, without querying the user.

I have just uploaded the 1.0 version of the Stand-alone Central Trace Panel for Mac OS X. This is a wrapper for the Central Trace panel included on the Central SDK. !()[/files/files/mesh/files/CentralTraceScrn.gif] The Central Trace Panel includes the following features: Ability to run the Panel outside of the Flash IDE. Ability to set the panel to always be the top window. You can download the application from here. You can download the source from here.

If you have used the Central trace panel, you may have noticed the “App Name Filter” text field in the bottom left of the panel. This is used to filter trace messages coming from Central so you only see messages coming from your application. So, how do you use this? It is actually pretty simple. First, you need to set a global variable in your App / Agent / Pod that tells Central your application name.

I just finished an article on using the Central Accordion Tab component. It will be on the Central DevNet Center in a week, but I thought I would go ahead and give a sneak peak. Below is an excerpt from the article that shows how to manage application views using the component. Note, that this has not been edited yet, so may contain typos, grammar mistakes or code errors. If you have any questions or run into any problems, post them in the comments.

I have released a new version of the Central developer chat. It is still a “beta” version, but I think you can see we have made a lot of progress. Lots of new stuff in this version, including: Connections moved to Agent (don’t disconnect when you change apps) User Profile support User Profile Pod New UI and Look (thanks to Andrew Borovsky) Support for Blast (works with Blog Reader) Close button bug is gone!

Last week at the MAX Keynote, AOL and Macromedia announced that it would be opening it IM (AIM / ICQ) network to Central developers. This is the first time that AOL has ever opened its network up to outside developers. Throughout the conference we showed a number of applications using the Presence SDK (the AIM / ICQ functionality). These apps included an early working version of a Central AIM / ICQ client, as well as an auction application that allowed buyers and seller to directly communicate, and a modified blog reader application that allowed readers to send comments to writers.

I have created a simple shell that allows the Central Debug panel to run outside of the Flash IDE. Among other things, it allows you to set the panel to always be on top, which makes it easy to watch trace information from Central. Requirements: Windows .NET Framework Flash Player 6 or higher ActiveX control You can download the installer from here. Note, this is something that I did in my own time, and is not supported by Macromedia.

Wow! Things have been crazy the past couple of weeks. There have been a ton of announcements coming out of Max. I am too tired right now to list all of them, or point out the ton of new Central related content on the website, but I did want to point that we have released the “Developer Release” of Central today. What exactly is the Developer Release, and what does it mean?

A couple of people have noticed that there is a new version of Central available, but have run into some issues with it. Well, here are the solutions: DevChat won’t install Beta product ids will not work in the final version of Central. The current version of DevChat has a beta product id, which is why it won’t install in the new version. You can install it with a different product.