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Adobe Flash 9 Public Alpha

This is a few days late but still very cool. Adobe released a public alpha where developers can experience the new Actionscript 3 and get up to speed on the “new way of doing things”. This is the only planned public release from Adobe and is meant to show the new Actionscript. Developers now get many cool features, such as, Regular Expressions, Document Classes, Faster Code Compiling, True OO Programming and the ability to really understand how to get things done in a quick and effective manner. In order to test out the new alpha you must have a licensed copy of Flash 8, which makes sense since they would be giving away the program if they didn’t require this.

The new “packages” in classes is pretty neat and allows you to truly build a complete class based application which is very easy to extend and add features later on down the road. A few noticable changes are the way in which you add movies to the stage and change the alpha “opacity” of an object. The alpha property now takes a decimal number to alter the property, such as 50% now becomes .5 and so on.

Overall I like the direction that Adobe is taking Flash and learning Actionscript 3 serves two purposes. The first being the new Flash and the other being the Flex program just released from Adobe.

Finally in case you missed it here is the download link again.

Update
Article on how to use the AS3 Preview!