senocular.com

Theres a new press release over at Macromedia concerning the Flash Platform. New elements covered in the release:

• Flash Player 8.5—the latest high-performance client runtime for rich Internet applications
• Flex Framework 2—the core programming model and component library for Flex
• Flex Builder 2—an all new Eclipse-based environment for developing rich Internet applications with the Flex Framework. Flex Builder 2, previously code-named Zorn, can incorporate rich media content from the recently released Macromedia Flash Professional 8, the leading authoring tool for creating rich interactive content.
• Flex Enterprise Services 2—essential data services, automated testing support, and an open adapter architecture for delivering data-intensive rich Internet applications and deeply integrating with enterprise service-oriented infrastructure
• Flex Charting Components 2—extensible components for advanced data visualization

For me, I'm most interested in Flash Player 8.5 (seems like a Director release). This is where ActionScript 3.0 comes into play:

Flash Player 8.5 adds industrial-strength programming power on top of the expressiveness introduced in Flash Player 8, creating a state-of-the-art, cross-platform runtime. It includes a new virtual machine that offers faster runtime performance, full runtime error reporting, improved debugging, and ActionScript 3. ActionScript 3 complies with the latest ECMAScript specifications, and increases developer productivity by making it easier to find and fix errors earlier.

Exciting news, and so soon after the release of Studio 8 too.