Out of the lab, and into the world: Flash 9 is now official and no longer beta.

Flash Player 9

Linux is still in beta, but coming. (I’ll be really interested to do some Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux benchmarking. Linux as a deployment platform has some real appeal.)

I’m personally finding that the combination of Flash and Processing for visuals is making me very happy indeed. Flash works for certain 2D image processing and drawing applications, while Processing excels at 3D and anything involving lots of number-crunching for the drawing routines.

Currently, I’m tackling the ActionScript 3.0 way of drawing, so while I’ll be on “vacation” for the rest of the week, I’ll be doing a lot of coding on my laptop. Expect some results some time after Thanksgiving. I’ve begun digging into the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook, which is about the only AS3 source in print now (aside from the official Adobe stuff, which is online rather than on dead tree carcasses).

Fortunately, thanks to O’Reilly and Safari, you don’t have to wait for the books. moock points out that Essential ActionScript 3.0 is available in “rough cut” form. (Hey, speaking as an author, maybe that’s all we should ever publish! No copy editors, no publishers.)

Essential ActionScript 3.0: Three More Chapters [moockblog]

I really want to get at the display API stuff, which is completely new in AS3 (a good thing, as just layering different images was a total pain in previous versions). Unfortunately, O’Reilly doesn’t want to charge my credit cards, so hopefully I’ll sort that out soon.

While looking to the future of Flash, Daniel Hai has a great piece on what he’d like to see added to FLV. I agree on all points, especially the caching idea:

The future of FLV? [Daniel Hai]

[tags]flash, upgrades, software, mactel, universal, Mac, Windows[/tags]

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