Check out Tareq’s post here:

Flash Authoring: Swiffy becomes Flash Pro plug-in to convert SWF’s to HTML

Info from Google here: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/06/swiffy-convert-swf-files-to-html5.html

• The ability to share assets across fla files during authoring (making it easier to use the same assets in FLAs destined for different screen sizes
• The ability to scale the entire contents of the Stage in an existing FLA when the stage is resized
• Code snippets for taking advantage of mobile device capabilities, such as touch, accelerometer, etc.
• Code templates for mobile authoring
• Publishing via AIR for iOS and Android
• On-device debugging via a USB port

A number of very good quality tutorials and demos have sprung up to help you get a handle on using these features in your projects. Here are some of the newer entries that you will hopefully find helpful. All but 1 of them is by Paul Trani. Thanks Paul!

Code snippets and templates:

• Video: Code templates for mobile development
• Video: Code snippets for mobile development

MAX sessions, Oct, 2011:

• Video: MAX session: Development best practices for authoring across devices
• Video: MAX session: Deploying Flash Professional across screens

Coding for device features:

• Video: Input for mobile devices: Accelerometer
• Video: Input for mobile devices: Touch events
• Video: Input for mobile devices: Gesture events
• Video: Input for mobile devices: Audio/Microphone
• Video: Input for mobile devices: Camera
• Video: Input for mobile devices: Geolocation/Google Maps

• Copy and Paste Layers
• Scale content when changing the stage size
• Export vector as bitmap
• Convert vector to bitmap
• Code snippets enhancements
• TLF Text enhancements
• AIR for Android support
• Debug on device via USB
• Visible property of symbols in the Property Inspector
• Shared project format with Flash Builder

You can check out his write-up here: Peachpit: What’s New and Improved in Adobe Flash CS5.5

For the full list, check out the Help, or the Flash Pro features page.

• Hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering through Stage 3D
• The Starling 2D framework for hardware accelerated, fluid 2D graphics
• New audio capabilities
• New API for providing hints to the garbage collector
• Native JSON
• Native Extensions

For those who would like to start taking advantage of these capabilities in their Flash Pro work, you can install the AIR 3.0 SDK into your existing Flash Professional installation and begin targeting it right away.

For complete instructions, see this TechNote:

Overlay AIR SDK | Flash Professional CS5.5

ADC Presents – Code Snippets for Mobile Development | Adobe TV.

• Scaling Multiple Selected Motion Tweens
  Discusses the challenge of scaling complex animations across multiple screen sizes, and offers a couple of workflows for accomplishing this in Flash Pro.

• Using Text Container Manager for Runtime TLF
  Highlights the strengths of TLF text and reveals a few tricks for optimizing SWF file sizes by using the Text Container Manager (TCM). TCM text is a subset of TLF text functionality that yields smaller file sizes and is appropriate for any text that will not change at runtime.

• Copying and Pasting Timeline Layers
  Shows how to manipulate entire sets of layers in the Timeline to duplicate various aspects of an animation or other timeline content.

• Multiple Spans on an IK Layer
  Demonstrates the animation potential of IK layers in Flash Professional CS5.5, allowing you to link assets together to create dynamic, skeleton-like structures. IK layers act sort of like like Motion tweens.

Check them out.

• How do you reference an object (movieclip, variable, function etc) in one SWF from another SWF?

• How do you reference the main timeline of SWF2 from SWF1 when SWF2 is loaded into SWF1?

• How do you reference the main timeline of SWF1 from SWF2 when SWF2 is loaded into SWF1?

• How do you communicate between two SWFs (possibly in different domains) that are opened at the same time by the same user?

• How do you communicate between one SWF opened at different times by the same user?

• How do you send data to a SWF in a popup?

You can also find information about how to load one SWF into another SWF in this TechNote.

The motion tween model is much easier to work with than older classic tweens that you had to create in earlier versions of Flash. You can literally start animating objects on the stage in just a few clicks.

If you are new to Flash Pro and want to use it for animation, here are a couple of solid tutorials that will help you learn the basics and start experimenting with your own artwork:

• Adobe TV: Create animation in Flash
• Adobe TV: Creating Motion Tweens

Todd Perkins does a nice job of covering the basic steps for adding a video to Flash. This is a good place to go first:

• Getting Started: Working with Video

Lisa Larson-Kelly covers a lot of ground in her Flash 411 show. This video is all about codecs, encoding, progressive vs. streaming, and choices for playing back video in Flash Player

• Flash Video Crash Course

Of course there’s also the Video Learning Guide on DevNet and the Help too.

He basically has you learn AS by typing in Flash. You have to learn some conventions that he uses in the tutorials, but they are simple and worth the first 3 minutes of reading. Then you’re off to the races. He has you type things into Flash and then see what happens very quickly.

For example, the first instruction is to type

trace(“Hello, World!”);

in the Actions Panel and then test your movie. Then he has you see if you can figure out how to change the message “Hello, World” to something else, with an option to show the answer if you want more help. Sounds pretty simple huh? I think some learners will really respond to this style of teaching. I’ve already linked to the tutorials in the Help, but I’m hoping more people will find the tutorials and take advantage of them. Let Ryan and me know what you think of them.