The end of the long anticipated wait for Adobe Creative Suite 3 is almost here. I got my first glimpse of the goodness to come in Las Vegas at Adobe MAX 2006. I expect the differences between Adobe and Macromedia products will finally come to an end as the best of both worlds are merged into one. Of course I’m mainly interested in Flash CS3. I never managed to make it onto the beta testing list and the Flash 9 alpha was Flash 8 with ActionScript 3 support, which was fun to play around with, but boasted no new interface enhancements and other goodies. Friends who did make it onto the beta have told me about some of the new features and I’m pretty stoked to try them out for myself.
The official announcement from the Adobe Creative Solutions PR team.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativesolutionspr/
Fraser 
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.
I thought this day would never come. The soon to be award winning Rolex.com redesign has finally been launched.
Before leaving Critical Mass I spent around three months on the Rolex team helping out on the development side of this site. Although the site appears to be completly Flash to the common user, it supports deep linking and it is search engine friendly. If the user does not have Flash installed it degrades gracefully to an HTML version.
The design is incredible, featuring stunning photographs of scenery from around the world as well as many very gorgeous models, and of course plenty of beautiful watches that most of us will never be able to afford.
Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.
Earlier today I received a news letter from ActionScript.org. This threw me off for a second because the only emails I get from them are job postings. The email template was well done and mimics their new site redesign, which is quite nice compared to their old outdated design. If you have already forgotten what it looked like, you can kind of make it out here using the Wayback Machine.
I am currently in the process of reading the excerpt from Tom Muck’s Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide. This excerpt is part of a new partnership between ActionScript.org and O’Reilly. It seems like a good deal for both sides. I am sure this will drive a lot more traffic to ActionScript.org and inevitably lead to more book sales for O’Reilly. So far the first few pages of the excerpt have been very well written and quite informative.
While reading the article I have realized that I will have to change my job title. Now that Flex has been released I am no longer a Flash Developer, but instead, a Client-Side ActionScript Programmer. I think that this is a much more dynamic sounding title, but it will take some getting used to after referring to myself as a Flash Developer for so long.
I am quite excited about the freshened up ActionScript.org site and enjoy having the ability to preview books before investing in them. Of course O’Reilly is one of my favorite publishers, so this is good news to me.
“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