If you’re interested in learning more about 3D, you’ll be happy to know that the new 3D support in Adobe Flash Player 10 does a lot of the work for you. Rodney Smith explains how to use ActionScript 3 in Flash CS4 to make a user-controlled 3D animation. For a different effect, Keiichi Yoshikawa describes the process behind his interactive business cards that take advantage of augmented reality technology in Flash to display 3D animations based on 2D block patterns.

Creative teams of designers and developers are continuing to garner attention with the cool experiences they’re building using the Flash Platform. This past week, 20th Century Fox released an interactive trailer, powered by Adobe AIR, for the upcoming release of the sci-fi adventure “Avatar” that you should check out. Download and install the trailer app to experience how you can use the AIR runtime to appeal both to your users and to brand owners.

One reason for the success of e-commerce is that the Internet can provide people with a secure medium for making payments. However, for RIA developers the challenge of integrating payment services into RIAs comes from the fact that current payment services such as Amazon FPS are designed to work in a request-response paradigm, while RIAs are stateful. Read Miti Pricope’s article to see how his approach can help you beat the challenge with Flex and Adobe AIR.

Many developers see the advantages of Test Driven Development (TDD) but hesitate to use it due to perceived time constraints. In his article, Test Driven Development using Flash Builder 4 beta and FlexUnit, Elad Elrom shows you how to use TDD to simplify future application maintenance while reducing your development time.