The Adobe Developer Connection is has announced that the brand new Adobe Cookbooks application is now live. This uber Adobe Cookbook application replaces the individual, product-specific cookbook applications that were previously in place for Flex, AIR and Mobile. The new application will still support those technologies, in addition to a dozen or so additional technologies, all within a single application. For those new to the cookbook applications, they are a searchable repository for community-generated code samples.

You can read more about the new application in Ed Sullivan's Logged In article on the Adobe Developer Connection.

A few key Cookbook links:
http://cookbooks.adobe.com - Cookbook home
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/flash
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/flex
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/air
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/actionscript
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/flashcatalyst
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/mobile
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/flashplayer

This very useful new book by Robert Reinhardt has just been published by Peachpit Press. This new book covers in-depth the preparation and delivery of video for the web via Flash CS4 Professional.

2 chapter excerpts have been posted to the web:

• Delivery and Deployment Primer
• Compression and Encoding Primer

In particular, page 3 of the Compression and Encoding Primer covers the Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6 codecs primarily used with Flash.

Please take a look at these excerpts. They should be very helpful to all of you getting up to speed with Flash video. And let me know in the comments what you think of them.

Enjoy.

The Adobe TV web site has recently undergone a major overhaul, and shows many significant improvements. Many users, including myself, have had complaints about the user interface, and navigation in particular, and these are much better.

Improvements include:

• User-customizable homepage
• Vastly improved navigation & search - You can actually see a list of the other episodes in a series while watching a specific episode.
• Save your favorite episodes to "My Library"
• Share videos on social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, and StumbleUpon
• Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite shows
• Pop-out the video player to view videos at any size
• Commenting & Rating
• Tags
• Much better performance

There are also now channels that are much more useful than before.

For all of you who appreciate video tutorials as a part of your learning process, I hope you find the new interface helps you find what you're looking for and learn Flash and the other products faster.

Are you going to MAX?

We are putting together some sessions with snacks and drinks to get feedback on the new version of Community Help with an all new AIR interface and some helpful new features.

The sessions will be held at these times:
• Monday 10/5/09 11:30 am - 1 pm
• Tuesday 10/6/09 4:30 pm - 6 pm

Please contact tknoop at adobe.com if you think you can make either of these sessions at MAX and she'll send you more details.

Thanks!

Using Video in Flash

Creating Buttons

Thank you.

You can download the update here, or choose Help > Updates from within Flash.

For more details, see the technote for this update. For more about this update the Flash product manager, Richard Galvan, visit his blog.

Here are the details. This info will be added to the online version of Extending Flash soon.

Usage
fl.publishDocument( flaURI [, publishProfile] );

Parameters
flaURI -- A string, expressed as a file:/// URI, that specifies the path of the FLA file that should be silently published.

publishProfile -- A string that specifies the publish profile to use when publishing. If this parameter is omitted, the default publish profile is used.

Returns
boolean

Description
Method; publishes a FLA file without opening it. This API opens the FLA in a headless mode and publishes the SWF (or whatever the profile is set to). The second parameter (publishProfile) is optional. The return value is a boolean indicating if the profile was found or not. In the case where the second parameter is not supplied, the return value is always true.

Example
The following example prompts the user to select a FLA file and silently publishes it using the “Default” publish profile:

var uri = fl.browseForFileURL("select", "select a FLA file to publish");
var publishProfileName = "Default";
fl.publishDocument(uri, publishProfileName);

There are two sets of criteria, each applying to a different study. Read the criteria carefully before responding. Also, it is important to indicate in the subject line of your response which one of the two studies you meet the criteria for and wish to participate in.

There will be 2 studies of Flash workflows. One is about deploying video content in Flash. The other is about creating a button to perform some control of the Timeline. The studies will be conducted over the telephone and Adobe Connect (software for screen sharing).

For the video study, participants must meet the following criteria:
- some experience with Flash CS4
- some experience viewing video on the Web
- no experience using video in Flash
- have any version of Creative Suite 4 or Flash Professional CS4 installed (with most recent updates) on a computer that can be connected to the Internet
- ability and willingness to install and use Acrobat Connect on the same computer as the above software
- a 90-minute block of free time between 10:00 and 16:00 Pacific Time (GMT-8) on a weekday during the first two weeks of August (3August-14August).
If you meet these requirements and would like to participate in this study, please contact me at jarmstrong [at] adobe [dot] com, with the subject line "Flash video study".

For the button study, participants must meet the following criteria:
- some experience with Flash CS4
- no experience creating buttons in Flash
- have any version of Creative Suite 4 or Flash Professional CS4 installed (with most recent updates) on a computer that can be connected to the Internet
- ability and willingness to install and use Acrobat Connect on the same computer as the above software
- a 90-minute block of free time between 10:00 and 16:00 Pacific Time (GMT-8) on a weekday during the first two weeks of August (3August-14August).
If you meet these requirements and would like to participate in this study, please contact me at jarmstrong [at] adobe [dot] com, with the subject line "Flash button study".

Participants in these studies will be thanked profusely in addition to receiving the Amazon gift card.

Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™ is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating user interfaces without coding. With Catalyst, you can:

• Transform artwork created in Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator® into functional user interfaces.
• Create interactive prototypes with the ability to leverage them in the final product
• Publish a finished project as a SWF file ready for distribution
• Work more efficiently with developers who use Adobe Flash Builder™ 4 to create rich Internet applications (RIAs). Designers use Flash Catalyst to create the functional user experience then provide the project file to developers who use Flash Builder to add functionality and integrate with servers and services.

I've been working with the tool for a while now and I think it's awesome. Designers, as well as the developers who work with them, will really appreciate the workflow that Catalyst enables. Designers don't need to learn code, and developers don't need to recreate designs in code.

Here are some of the resources that are available for the Beta 1 release:

• Flash Catalyst Beta 1 Adobe Labs Homepage
• Flash Catalyst Beta Help System (Commenting enabled)
• Flash Catalyst Videos and Tutorials
• Flash Catalyst Beta Forum Discussion

Take a look at these new titles. Commenting is enabled on all of them, so let us know what you think.

Animation Learning Guide for Flash

Motion migration guide for Flash

Using Adobe Media Encoder CS4

Graphic Effects Learning Guide for Flash CS4 Professional

AS3 migration resources for Flash

Developers and designers talk about migrating to Actionscript 3

Deconstructing the Actionscript 3 Flash video gallery application

Loading images and Library assets in Flash with Actionscript 3

Understanding Actionscript 3 debugging in Flash

Richard Harrington and Marcus Geduld at Peachpit Press have just released a new book about Flash and After Effects. They do a great job of explaining each application in terms that users of the other application can understand. It's a great mapping between the functionalities of the 2 applications. They also provide a lot of information about how to use the applications in concert with one another.

Peachpit Press has made these two chapters available on their website:

• "After Effects essentials for Flash users"
• "Flash essentials for After Effects users"

The rest of the book goes on to explain how you do creative and production work in each of these applications and then move the pieces and outputs back and forth to get the best of both. But you have to buy the book to get those parts. I'm pretty sure that many of you will do just that as soon as you see the value in the introductory chapters.

Thank you, Richard and Marcus, for creating a two-way information bridge between these two applications.

http://adobeforums.adobe.com/

Here are some of the improvements. Some are new or updated depending on which system you are coming in from. For example, the old Macromedia forums didn’t allow images, but the old Adobe ones did.

• Combined previous (Macromedia and Adobe) forums into one
• New software platform
• Email participation
• RSS feeds
• Unified Adobe ID login
• Embed videos and images
• File Attachments
• Updated look and feel

There's also a FAQ about the changes here: http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b7c637/

The live date for the change is still to be determined, but should be fairly soon. I'll post again when the switch has happened.

UPDATE:

Timeline
• OLD Forums will go down at 3pm PST on Friday, April 3.
• NEW Forums will be back online around 12:00 pm (Noon) PST on Sunday, April 5.

More notable highlights
• Integration of Adobe ID for true single sign on to all Forums
• Consolidation of Macromedia and Adobe Forums onto one new system.
• Updated look and feel, more consistent with other forum systems
• Email participation, including starting a new discussion and alerts
• RSS feeds for many parts of the forum (topics, users, announcements, etc.)
• Improved moderation capabilities (hosts can delete inappropriate content)
• Rich text options: inline images and videos, file attachments, code samples
• Improved search capabilities:
o Wildcard searches (Multiple or single character)
o Fuzzy Search (search for foam also retrieves roams)
o Proximity, weighting, date range, specific user

Here’s our new “Tutorials from Adobe” channel on YouTube, which you can subscribe to:

http://www.youtube.com/user/tutorialsfromadobe

For the pilot, we’re starting with the eleven Dreamweaver CS4 videos. The DW series was selected for pilot because it contains two of the most popular CS4 videos on Adobe TV: “DW overview” and “Defining a site.” Here’s the Learn Dreamweaver CS4 playlist:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D46F0582FED3D64E

In the near future, we'll be adding video tutorials for many of the other products as well.

Let us know what you think.

I also included Flash CS3 videos that are still applicable to CS4. I've included a few 3rd party links as well.

Many sections of Flash Help refer to additional video tutorials (click to find them all) in context to provide information about specific features.

As always, if you find a 3rd party video, tutorial, or article that you think is really good, add a link to it on the relevant page of Flash Help on the web. If it's really good, we'll likely add a link to it in the Help.

Check it out at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Flash/10.0_UsingFlash/WS3C5136D8-8D46-4d6d-9AA9-8438BAA91F9D.html