While reading through MXNA today, I came across an article written by Peter Baird outlining new updates to the latest release of the Flex Style Explorer. This application is a huge time saver when creating CSS to control the look of your Flex applications.

Some of the new features include:
- Advanced Color Picker
- Export All CSS
- Support for StyleName Styles
- Text Formatting Styles
- Text-Entry for Slider Controls
- Inclusion on New Components
- Improved Navigation
- Indication of Components Edited
- Progressive Disclosure of Controls
- Improved Graphic Representation of Styles
- Improved Scrollbar management
To read more about the new Flex Style Explorer visit Adobe Consulting.
Try the online version.
“Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems. Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers can create, test and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex® 2 Software Developers Kit (SDK), Adobe Flash Player 9 and the free Flex Data Services 2 Express.”
Read the full press release
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.
Fraser