I was just told that the next release of Flash with be titled Adobe Flash CS3. If you are unfamiliar with CS, it stands for Creative Suite. The current release of Adobe’s Creative Suite is CS2, so I think we can expect a whole bundle of software being released at the same time that may include titles such as Flash CS3, Photoshop CS3, IllHand CS3 (Illustrator + Freehand), InDesign CS3, DreamLive CS3 (Dreamweaver + GoLive), Acrobat Paper CS3 (Acrobat + Flash Paper) and more. This is all just speculation on my part, so don’t take my word for it. I am pretty sure about the Flash CS3 part of it though.
The new Flash CS3 will definitely have enhancements to its importing abilities with Photoshop and Illustrator. From what I have heard, you will be able to access bitmaps and vectors right down to a specific layer within the import window. I am sure copy & paste between programs will function a lot smoother than previously.
I just stumbled across http://programmermeetdesigner.com/. This seems like a very useful site for those freelance jobs where one of your clients comes to you for a full site and you are only interested in doing the development side of things. Now you can team up with a designer who has little knowledge about development and a greater knowledge of design. I am sure you client will be pleased when you deliver them a site that does not look like it came from the internet of the 90s.
“This site was created to unite programmers and designers because rarely is a person good at both programming and designing. PMD helps programmers and designers partner up to make websites and web applications that look and work great. Now content writers and entrepreneurs can also join up to find people to work with.” programmermeetdesigner.com
In AS3, one of the most significant changes was to make the EventDispatch class the standard tool for calling events. This is a huge step in ActionScript as code written by different developers will become a lot more similar.
In the following example I will demonstrate how to use addEventListener to add a click event to a button that is built using the new SimpleButton object. The SimpleButton is a light weight alternative to the heavier MovieClip object.
