Grab the open source goodness known as Astra 1.2 from the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center and read all about the new 1.2 release on the Yahoo! Flash Blog. This release includes updates to the Flash components, the removal of the Flex Maps hack from the Web APIs library (use the new Yahoo! Maps AS3 API instead), and the addition of the new Astra Utilities library.

Looking over the release notes, I realize that I made loads of contributions to this release. In particular, here are some highlights:

• Charts now support legends! This is a much needed feature that just required a bit of time to get right.

• Some cool new additions to LineCharts. I’ll be writing a blog post highlighting some of these new features soon.

• Layout containers should be a big help to many projects. I’ve seen time and again Flex developers doing an AS3 project and complaining that there are no layout controls available in Flash CS3. Now you’ve got HBoxPane, VBoxPane, FlowPane, TilePane, and BorderPane at your disposal.

• A lightweight Animation class. Yeah, I know, why do we need another tween library? We probably don’t, but when I wrote it, nothing else quite fit my needs. This actually got released in 1.1 as part of the charts, but now that we’ve got a library for generic utilities, I can give it a proper moment in the spotlight.

• The layout utility provides the core framework used by the Flash CS3 layout containers. The purpose of this library is to allow component developers to build layout containers for any component set a bit more easily. Please read the documentation on YDN if you want to learn more. I explain the layout utility in much more detail over there.

Again, grab all the new downloads from the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center. All of our releases are available under the terms of the new BSD license, so enjoy! If you have any questions, comments, bug reports, or feature requests, please post them to the ydn-flash list.