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It has long been known that Flash has had an easter egg in its About dialog - a secret collection of Flash games - which continues to exist today even with Flash 8. But did you know Fireworks 8 has a little hidden surprise somewhere within its interface too? I found it, can you? It's quite odd to say the least.

Creating Fireworks Panels Part 1: Introduction to Custom Panels is now up on Macromedia's Fireworks Developer Center. Part 1 is a runthrough of the basics of how panels work and developing your own simple panels using two basic examples, Create Ellipse and Mirror. Part 2 should be available sometime next month and will cover more advanced topics in Panel development. Though this tutorial is directed towards panels in Fireworks, many of the same concepts apply in Flash panel development. So if you're interested in developing panels in Flash, you might want to give this a skimming.

Now that a new cycle is starting for Flash, its time to let Macromedia know what you want the next version of Flash to include. A long list is already being developed; be sure not to miss out on adding your input. See the Flash Team's wishlist post.

BLAZE is Flash 9's codename. Don't get too excited, however. BLAZE is not coming out any time soon. But it will be the version of Flash that supports this new ActionScript 3.0 we've been hearing so much about these past couple of days. Ok, you can get excited again, because an early alpha version of BLAZE will be available to Flash 8 Pro and Studio 8 customers before its final release. Read more about it from Mike Downey's blog posting.

ZenDoc, formerly known as AS2Docular, is alive and kicking with a new release. If you aren't familiar with the "tool formerly known as AS2Docular," it is a simple web-based documentation tool for ActionScript 2.0 source files that uses standard JavaDoc comment tags for documentation generation. This release includes some bug fixes and some minor tweaks to the interface as well as improving the template tag format to allow for more standards compliant templates. When ZenDoc reaches version 1.0, it will be free to download for personal or commercial use.

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.

This is just a reminder for all Swift3D users out there that Erain has a page with instructions on making Swift3D compatible with Flash 8. This includes both Mac and Windows versions.

Thanks to Markku for suggesting a new panel extension, the Named Selection panel. This panel allows you to search for and select objects within your Fireworks document by name. Though it seems pretty trivial at first, it can be very helpful provided you stick to a consistent naming convention for your objects.

Fireworks users have spoken and someone was listening! MXNA now has a category for Fireworks. Thank you Alan and everyone who signed the petition supporting the rally to make this happen.

Update: For more information (and instructions on adding your feed to the Fireworks category), see Alan's post about the addition of the Fireworks category.

I just uploaded a new Fireworks panel; a simple Used Fonts panel which scans and lists all the fonts used in the current Fireworks document. Selecting a font from this list will apply it to the current selection.