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What can you do in 25 lines of ActionScript ? How about participating to the The 25-Line ActionScript Contest! January finalists include amazing entries, such as a real-time webcam video to ASCII art conversion, fire blending, 3D world exploring and Mandelbrot zooming amongst other. This really shows the power of Flash and Action Script as well as the gain of interest in the web-related demo scene. Now the question is when will we be able to see such advanced demos using only Javascript and Canvas ? My guess is pretty soon if the war for browser performance continues...

A little more than a year after its first release, Microsoft today announces the immediate availability of the second version of its Silverlight plugin. Silverlight 2 is a programmable web browser and mobile phone plugin whose main goal is to compete with Adobe's Flash in vector graphics, animation, online video streaming... and many other "rich" user-experience tasks. And it seems to be working as Silverlight is now available for a quarter of the consumers worldwide, according to Yahoo's article.

Ajaxian, Antun Karlovac and Raju Bitter report that the 4.1 version of OpenLaszlo has finally been released and can now generate DHTML in addition to the already existing SWF output format. The project started in March 2006 and took the team behind this free Adobe Flex competitor more than two years of development... but the wait was worth it !

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Adobe (ADBE) will make it easier for search engines to index more content in applications built with its Flash software. Previously, Google and Yahoo could index text and links in Flash animations and applications. Now, with some "optimized Adobe Flash Player technology," they'll be able to "uncover information" in Flash files "that is currently undiscoverable by search engines."