Initially, having already read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook, I wasn’t planning on reading another book focusing on introductory ActionScript 3, but then I started to hear more and more about Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. Lee Brimelow is quoted on the cover calling it “The best ActionScript book ever written.” How can you argue with that recommendation?

For beginners, the book does a good job explaining core language fundamentals (variables, conditionals, loops, functions, etc.) and each aspect you would control with the language (vectors, pixels, sound, video, xml, etc.). And throughout the book’s tutorials the reader is shown the steps involved in building an XML based website, giving a nice continuity to some of the later chapters and reinforcing the importance of understanding the material.

As an experienced Flash developer, I particularly liked Chapter 7 on motion. They did an excellent job explaining how to use basic geometry and trigonometry within your Flash Projects for positioning and animation. It was a welcomed refresher.

I would recommend Learning ActionScript 3.0 to anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with Flash development. Otherwise, you would be doing yourself a disservice.

Tyler Hawes at Mode pointed me to an informative MAX presentation by Jim Corbett, a Flash Player Engineer at Adobe, on SWF Searchability. He covers how the Flash Search Player (i.e., Ichabod, the headless Flash Player) works, what Google can get out of your SWF files for indexing as well as generally clearing up questions regarding the current state of Flash SEO.

Following the FlaCC demos at past conferences, Adobe has released Alchemy on Adobe Labs.

Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

You can find more information and download the Alchemy toolkit on Adobe Labs.

This week at Adobe MAX, the Google Analytics team unveiled Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash. According to Google:

This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.

Developers have the choice of using a Flash Component or a AnalyticsLibrary Component, for complete control over tracking objects directly in AS3.

For more detailed information, check out the introduction and implementation guide over on Google Code. Then, watch the video demo on YouTube.

The Digital Pictures Interactive team has done it again. This week they released a new video demoing what they’re calling Augmented Reality. The process inserts a Papervision 3D object/character into the video stream from a webcam. Yeah, it’s as crazy as it sounds:

Related: DPI were part of the team behind the Save Your Sensible website.

At MAX this week, Adobe officially pulled Thermo out of Adobe Labs obscurity, gave it an icon and renamed it to Adobe Flash Catalyst. The official spiel from Adobe:

Adobe® Flash® Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. These can range from interactive Ads, product guides and design portfolios to user interfaces for applications. Flash Catalyst enables designers to start from static compositions created in Adobe Photoshop® CS4, Illustrator® CS4, or Adobe Fireworks® CS4 and convert the artwork into applications and interactive content.

Despite the activity, the project is “many moons” away from a public beta. However, you can follow the development over on the Flash Catalyst Team Blog.

Adobe MAX 2008 North America took place earlier this week in San Francisco. As expected, with the congregation of Flash heads in the Bay Area the blogosphere is active with Flash-related posts.

Dion Almaer talks about how the Flash platform could join the Open Web. He suggests:

Adobe has an opportunity here. They can move to the right and Flash could become strongly in the Open Web camp. Then we would all be stronger as we come up against Silverlight.

Following Almaer’s post, Brad Neuberg wrote up an exhaustive look at how Adobe could actually go about bringing Flash into the Open Web. He outlines six points:

1. Cross-Platform Standards
2. No Vendor Lock-in
3. Anyone Can Innovate
4. Powerful, Universal Clients
5. Open Source Implementations
6. Mashable, Searchable, and Integrated

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the aftermath of Adobe MAX, but these posts are sparking conservation on the idea of open-sourcing Flash (or aspects of the Flash platform) to the development community.

Grant Skinner has been hard at work on gTween, a new tweening engine for AS3. In case you’re wondering why he would take the time to create another tweening engine:

There are a lot of great tweening engines out there. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Jack Doyle’s TweenLite (and he’s been incredibly productive adding new features lately). However, none of these libraries exactly fit the needs of me and my team. I wanted an engine that was small, fast, hugely flexible, and built from the ground up for AS3 and developers.

While I’m still sticking with TweenLite, Skinner’s feature overview showcases strong core functionality. The engine is still in a beta stage, but he just released Beta 3 on November 4th—work is progressing steadily. If you’re looking for a new tweening engine, gTween might be the answer.

Earlier this month, Peter Elst posted on his blog about the FlaCC Project. In a nutshell, FlaCC is a way to compile C and C++ libraries to ActionScript bytecode, making code written in the C/C++ languages accessible to Flash. Interpreters for various scripting languages are actually written in C/C++ so this could allow you to port Ruby, PHP or Python into your AIR applications.

This video from 2007’s Adobe MAX Chicago is enough to spark your imagination:

The official release of Flash Player 10 is now available. According to the press release:

Adobe Flash Player 10 builds on the capabilities of the world’s most pervasive application runtime with new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration.

Download the full press release (PDF).

I’ll also remind you of the sIFR bug with Flash 10 we mentioned back in July. When you update your Flash Player, make sure to keep said bug in mind.