Today and over the last week, I’ve been a part of several big launches and redesigns at Yahoo!, and I thought I’d share a little about each with you. We’ve got exciting things happening on the Flash Platform team on the Sunnyvale campus, and hopefully, this week’s activities will only be the start.
First, I highly recommend that you check out what’s new at the Flash Developer Center on the Yahoo! Developer Network. We’ve got a brand new library up for download that adds some cool user interface components to Flash CS3. You’ll find an AutoComplete component, a Menu, a Tree, a TabBar, and my personal favorite, four different Charting components. All free and available under the terms of terms of the BSD license.
That’s not all, of course. In no particular order, here’s everything I’ve been involved with that has either launched for the first time or gone through big changes this week.
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Yahoo! Flash Developer Center – A central source for open source code and libraries, articles, videos, all related to Flash development. We did a big redesign and added all sorts of content.
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Astra Flash Components – As mentioned above, it’s a user interface component library for Flash CS3 developed by Yahoo!.
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We also updated the Astra Web APIs library with new documentation.
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Yahoo! Flash Blog – The Flash Platform team’s official blog. Subscribe to the feed to stay to date on all things Flash at Yahoo!
Like I said, I’m excited about all the changes made in the last week. Flash is a great web technology, and many folks at Yahoo! certainly enjoy developing with ActionScript. Don’t worry, we definitely have Flex on our radar too. Expect to see more cool libraries for Flash technologies in the future. Now, quit reading, go download the Astra Flash Library, play with the cool new components, and join the ydn-flash group to discuss it. We’d love to hear about any bugs you discover (it’s still beta, after all), and please don’t be afraid to ask us for new features (or even entirely new components!).
[...] Josh Tynjala of Zeus Labs posted some word about exciting Flash stuff going on at Yahoo! Rather than re-posting it, simply visit his blog. [...]
Wow. Awesome work. You must be proud to be part of such a epic company doing awesome work like this for the community. My hat is off to you and Yahoo.
Thanks, Dustin. The response from the community has been very positive, and I can certainly say that it makes me happy to contribute.
When will there be a Flex version of the components?
ArneO, we are exploring the possibility of implementing some Flex components, but we have not yet announced any dates for the release of an Astra Flex library.
Looks good, but I wish they would of used Flash 7 or 8. Backwards compatibility would be much better, despite what Adobe says about Flash 9 having like 95% of users, I dont buy that inflated number. But it depends on your users and how likely they are to have the Flash 9 Player.