The Flash Authoring team does not have plans to release any new components in the CS3 timeframe.   Of course, the Flex team will continue to develop and release new components; components are an integral part off their model and core to the success of the Flex product.

When the Flash Authoring team went out and met with users to research what we should be developing for CS3 and beyond, additional components didn't make the cut. When we focus on the needs of the community, this is what we hear loud and clear: focus on expressiveness, focus on ground breaking design and focus on enabling the community to meet the needs of other users through extensibility. Demand for components has been very fragmented – some users want x, other users want y - and no matter how many components we have built we were still not fully satisfying all the needs of the community. And, frankly, we realize that in many cases Flex is a better alternative for some of the customers that ask for components to assist in RIA development.

So, for you component lovers, we’re doing two things – 1) continuing to invest in the extensibility of Flash Pro so that you can build and share the components you need and 2) investing in integration with Flex Builder to make it even easier to take advantage of what Flex has to offer.

So what does that mean to our users today? Well, it means that we are looking to third party vendors and our community to help fill that gap.

We have started to provide documentation on how to build and extend the new AS3 components. Jeff Kamerer wrote a comprehensive article on the matter and you can find it at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/creating_as3_components.html

Some community members and third party vendors have already created some great components, for example:

1. The Adobe Exchange for Flash has a large selection of third party components.

2. Grant Skinner has been developing components for some time now. In fact as many of you already know he worked with Metaliq to develop the AS3 components for Flash CS3. <URL?>

3. Yahoo has a great set of components at http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/astra-flash/

4. Digicrafts has some visually rich components at http://www.digicrafts.com.hk/components/

5. There is a nice selection of components at http://www.afcomponents.com/components/

** If your site is not listed, please send me a post and I will add it to the list.

Of course, everything I write today is affected by what our community has to say. When it’s all said and done you really are the ones that determine what we do. So with that in mind there are some other ideas/questions we have that I would like to throw out there and see what the feedback is.

1. What could we do to help promote and encourage the community to start creating new components for Flash Pro?

2. In the future, how would supporting the Flex components help solve the problem?

We are looking forward to talking with as many Flash users as possible. Also, make sure not to miss the Keynote. Kevin Lynch will be presenting and it's going to be a vey good session.

See you there.

Here are a few other enhancements that were added to the new update:

Improved performance
• Multi-core support; full screen mode with hardware scaling; multi-threaded video decoding
Flash Player Cache
• Cross-domain Flex Framework caching; reduced application size and faster download times
Works better with Ajax
• Improved JavaScript integration; improved browser integration
Reaching parity on Linux
• Full screen mode now for Linux Flash Player

Flash Player archives

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266&sliceId=2

You will find Flash players from the current player all the way back to Flash Player 2.

Have fun testing.

I have included my FFanimaotr flex project that has a working sample of this. You must have Flex and Flash CS3 installed for this to work since we need the Animator class that ships with Flash CS3. Just import the project to Flex and it should work.

Here is the Flex code:

I have enclosed two xml animation files called blurswirl.xml, which is the same example I used in my previous blog, and bounce.xml. You can use your own if you want, just add your animation file to the bin folder in the Flex project and change the name in the Flex code (in Green). Remember that you create animation xml files by selecting an animation on the timeline and then use the "Export Motion XML" command under the command menu.

Ok, so the part I need to point out is that if you want to create your own flex project then the trick is to add the Flash CS3 class path to your Flex project so that it knows where to go get the animator class. Normally the path (in Windows) is C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS3\en\Configuration\ActionScript 3.0\Classes, but if you installed Flash CS3 in a different location you would need to adjust the path. On a Mac look for the same folder but starting from your application folder. You add this to your Flex project by going to the Project properties and adding the class path to the "Source Path" tab under "Flex Build Path".

Ok, so how does this work? simple, you just run the same AS3 code that I showed before (in Red). Except this time you tell it to animate a Flex component. In this case I am using the calendar component, but feel free to replace it with any component (SWFloader, VideoDisplay, etc) just make sure to give it an ID of "moveThis".

The only thing I am doing a bit different than what I did in my Flash CS3 example is calling Animator's rewind function. as in:

if (my_animator) my_animator.rewind();

I am doing this so that when you select a different animation the component you are animating doesn't continue from where it finished and fly off the page.

My example is actually more complicated than it needs to be. I am using a combo box with two animations you can select from. When one is selected it calls my animate function with in tern loads the XML file and then uses the Animator class to apply the animation to any component that has an ID of "moveThis".  The beauty is that its all at runtime.

Play around with it. See what you can do with it and if you think you have something cool please share.

For example:

the animation that is illustrated above is a typical timeline animation. If you then right click on the timeline you would see the option to copy motion to AS3.

It then asks you to specify and instance name of the symbol to which you would like to apply this code too. Flash CS3 then places code into the clipboard. If you were to paste this code in the actionscript panel you would see:

Notice that the code in red is the only part that truly is AS3. The blue part is XML describing the animation.

To get this to work, just create a new AS3 document and paste the code on frame 1 of the timeline and drop any symbol on stage and call it's instance 'box'. Run the movie and you will see the symbol move across the stage.

Ok,so what's so cool about this? well, first. It allows me to re-use an animation as many times as I want. It also allows a normal designer/animator to work with a developer that prefers to see everything in code. However, one of best parts is that it allows me to store my animations as external XML files.

If instead of right-clicking on the timeline, I would have gone to the command menu and selected "Export Motion'. I would then be able to save just the XML description to an external file.

ok, so now what. Well, lets say I saved my animation as swirl.xml, if I change my AS3 code a little. Like so:

I can now have my flash movie load the animation at runtime and play it. This will allow me to change the behavior of the animation just by replacing an XML file. Cool huh? I'll let you figure out all the uses fot it.

Oh, and in case you are wondering the same animation can then be applied to a component in Flex. I'll show how to do that next post.

This release has a lot of great new features and I will be covering all of them in some detail in this blog. But to start out I will point of 5 of the biggest.

1. Photoshop and Illustrator import - you can now import all of your psd and ai files and not loose any fidelity while doing so.
2. Support for ActionScript 3.0 - AS got faster, stronger, and better than ever.
3. New UI - if you have a laptop this is a must have.
4. Copy motion to AS3 - (one of my favs) this lets you take any animation that is on the timeline and convert it to ActionScript 3.0. You can then apply that animation to any symbol as pure code.
5. New components - these are all new AS3 components that are much easier to skin. Just double click on the component and you have access to all the skin symbols.

So those are some of the major features, but we also added a few small tweaks and fixes to the tool. There is one in particular that I am really happy about, but instead of just telling you about it, lets see if any of you Flash gurus can figure this one out. We changed something in the documents property window (or something you can access from the documents property window)...can someone tell me what it is?

One last thing. Can someone shed some light into who is responsible for www.gettheglass.com  I love this site. Very nice work.