Yahoo! launches Flash library and blog (and I helped!)

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.

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!).

About Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala is a frontend developer, open source contributor, bowler hat enthusiast, and karaoke addict. You might be familiar with his project, Feathers UI, an open source user interface library for Starling Framework that is included in the Adobe Gaming SDK.

Discussion

  1. Pingback: Yahoo! Flash Stuff | reintroducing.com Blogging Receptacle

  2. Dustin Senos

    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.

  3. jive

    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.

  4. MrShepherd

    Hi Josh, I wonder if you can help me with your Astra Tree component?

    What’s the best way to change the text color of the selected item?

    I’ve tried an event listener, but it only changes the text color on press…then it goes back to the regular textFormat style.

    Thanks for the help…and thanks for sharing the components.

  5. Josh Tynjala

    MrShepard, I didn’t create the Tree component in Astra, so I’m not too familiar with it. Most likely, you want to create a custom cell renderer that changes the text color itself. Maybe there’s a selectedTextFormat style, though. I’m not sure.