Grant Skinner was gracious enough to publish all the slides from his Introductory AS3 workshop online. There are 165 slides, so it’s quite an extensive workshop. If anyone was looking for a nice introduction into AS3, look no further.

Adobe’s released an upgrade to all version of the CS. Go to Adobe’s site for the official information. Flash Mazagine has a better take:

The only real news here for Flash/FLEX developers is the ability to embed SWF content inside Acrobat 9. In reality this is what you’d pay for. For Print professionals, this is much more interesting as the new PDF preview features alone can save failed print runs.

So – unless you work at a print shop and double as a print designer, you can safely ignore this upgrade.

Adobe is developing a new SDK, called SwitchBoard,  that allows AIR apps to talk to the Creative Suite apps.

In 2007, Adobe announced Adobe AIR™ – the Adobe Integrated Runtime – for creating stand-alone web applications based on the web standards of HTML, Flash®, and Ajax. The AIR environment allows developers to create dynamic, appealing, cross-platform applications. Now, with the Adobe technology code named SwitchBoard, AIR applications can communicate with applications in the Adobe Creative Suite®.

Adobe AIR developers can create applications that participate as first class citizens in creative workflows. Each SwitchBoard solution consists of an AIR application written for SwitchBoard, JavaScripts, and the SwitchBoard service that delivers the scripts to the Creative Suite applications. AIR developers only need to include a Flex library called SwitchBoard.swc in their projects in order to send and receive scripts to and from Creative Suite applications.

SwitchBoard brings together the power of the automation in the Creative Suite applications with the potential for third parties to extend the creative process with new applications produced using AIR. The result is an extensible, powerful, cross-platform environment that can quickly adapt to today’s rapidly changing creative workflows.

I’m a late posting this, but Flashmagazine.com has a some information and a few spy shots of the UI for Flash CS4. This is going to be a great release! The only thing that CS3 had going for it was ActionScript 3. Now it’s the designers/animators turn to get new features.

I just got back from the July meeting of the Charlotte Flash Designer/Developer Meetup.com group. It’s a nice mix of people. The purpose of the group is similar to what we want to acomplish with this group. We definitely recommend attending one of the meetups.