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.

Being a predominately self-taught web developer, I’ve slowly migrated towards object oriented programming and, to my credit, made some applications that work, but those apps definitely could have been made better and more efficiently.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson and found it quite helpful. Now knowing what the MVC, singleton, proxy, iterator, composite, decorator, command, memento and state patterns are I can better utilize them in my Flash projects and ultimately make better coded apps than I could before.

In addition to design patterns, the book also has a couple chapters on application design, programming interfaces, working with events, sending & loading data, E4X XML and regular expression, which offer more in-depth coverage than in other books.

In short, if you’re curious to learn more about classes and design patterns in ActionScript 3, I would recommend that you read Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns.