Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[drew johnston <drew AT mmteach.com>]

For any of you interested in Flash Development-- Macromedia has started 
selecting it's first round of Beta testers for the new Central SDK.  
Sign up now if you want to be involved...

For anyone who doesn't know what Central is, but actually cares, 
Central is a new Flash runtime environment (think "screw the browser, 
I'll just install the player as a stand alone application").  Still 
sandboxed, so you can't write to a local text file, but you can use 
persistent local shared objects (basically, flash's version of cookies).

The whole point of central is taking advantage of the "partially 
connected model".... in other words, providing folks who have mobile 
lan cards and access the www from several different points, sometimes 
being connected, and sometimes not, with applications designed to work 
in such an environment.  i.e. I order a book off Amazon.com, but don't 
currently have a connection-- my order is stored and then processed 
when the app detects an available connection...

They also promise the "holy grail" of context -- apps being able to 
determine their location, so as to make intelligent decisions about 
delivering localized content.  I.e. you're on a bus. trip in San Fran, 
open your laptop, and boom, your central weather app has the weeks 
forcast for the san fran area...

Interesting stuff...

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/central/

Drew