Last month Yahoo! released version 1.1 of Yahoo! ASTRA libraries for Flash and Flex. Based on community feedback, they revised it and came up with a maintenance release as 1.1.1. Hence there are no new components but many fixes to minor bugs. Here are release notes from Josh Tynjala directly: 

AlertManager (Flash)

• Bug fix: Alert dialog lost focus if the user selected the text and then hit the tab key.

Charts (Flash)

• Improved animation and invalidation of markers.
• Bug fix: Setting axis maximum less than the value of an origin-based marker (column, bar) hides the marker.
• Bug fix: With large data sets, line charts are displayed offset from the left, which hides some data on the right
• Bug fix: Axis displays improperly when all items have the same value.
• Bug fix: Infinite loop when calculating minimum and maximum values in some cases.
• Bug fix: PieChart displays the wrong category when values are primitive and equal.  

MenuBar (Flash)

• Bug fix: Selected menubar button lost focus if it was toggled very quickly with keyboard shortcuts.
• Bug fix: Skin conflicts between Menu and MenuBar.  

TabBar (Flash)

• Bug fix: Styles like textFormat are not passed through to tabs.
• Bug fix: focusIndex setter tries to access buttons before they are created.  

AutoCompleteManager (Flex)

• New events
• Added API for adjusting minimum disk space requirements
• Bug fix: caret bug when changing selection of completion dropdown
• Bug fix: itemToLabel bug on certain types of entries
• Bug fix: loopSelection quirkiness

 This updated version is available on Yahoo! Flash Developer Center as following:

• Download ASTRA Flash components (1.1.1)
• Download ASTRA Flex components (1.1.1)

Via – http://www.yswfblog.com/blog/2008/02/20/announcing-astra-111/

Today adobe announces new version of Adobe Director 11. Also with this new product release, they also announced a new release for shockwave player also.

Here are the Top features in Director 11:

• Support for more than 40 video, audio, and image file formats
• Native 3D rendering with DirectX 9 support
• Advanced physics with the included AGEIAâ„¢ PhysXâ„¢ engine
• Support for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional software and video created with Flash
• Unicode support, including multimode publishing
• Enhanced text rendering engine
• Enhanced user interface
• Enhanced Script Browser and full JavaScript support
• Bitmap filters
• Xtra plug-ins

Useful Links:

1. Adobe Director 11 Homepage
2. Detailed Features list for Director 11
3. Pre-order Director 11
4. Pre-order upgrade to Director 11
5. Download Shockwave Player 11

We are using FlashDevelop as our AS3 code in our daily coding since a long time at Avinashi.

FlashDevelop is came up with a new Beta 6 release for version 3 with obviously some cool features and some bug-fixes. These features are as following:

Changes:

• General UI and localization fixes and improvements
• New Bookmarks panel added for an overview of all your open documents bookmarks
• Captures Flash CS3 compiler errors in FD results panel when CS3 is called from FD
• Contextual generators (Ctrl+Shift+1) for getter/setter, event listeners, override methods, interface implementation, unknown var/method
• First class SWC integration in AS3 projects
• New in templates, set package of new project. Creates the main class with the package you provide
• You can run your project in your web browser instead of FD or external player
• Less aggressive and generally smarter completion
• Improved Flex Compiler support
• Improved Flash CS3 support

Important:

• Java 1.6+ is required for the Flex compiler (ActionScript 3).
• The Flex SDK (2 or 3) is required for ActionScript 3 development if you don’t use Flash CS3.
• Backup your customized user files and uninstall any previous versions of FlashDevelop 3.0.0.

Full Release Notes can be found here.

Download FlashDevelop 3.0.0 Beta 6 (Built from rev. 2133)

And obviously if that seems a nice editor for Flash CS3 developers, you should donate too J

Finally, Flash Media Server 3 is shipping.

Flash Media Server 3 is available into two editions.

Flash Media Interactive Server 3:

This edition is traditional media server edition like we had in version 2. i.e. you can use this edition to do realtime audio, video and data sharing application. It includes all the features that is require to make collaboration applications.

Price:

Price for this edition is US$ 4,500 if you are buying it as a new product. If you want to upgrade it from previous version of flash media server, than it will cost you US$ 1,995. Ofcourse, 10 connection limited Developer edition is free.

What’s New:

• Support For H.264 and HE-AAC for Flash Player, AIR, Adobe Media Player and FlashLite 3
• Performance Gain – According to Adobe, its 2x than FMS 2.
• Secured content delivery through RTMPE with 128-bit encryption
• New plug-in architecture
• AMF3 Support – Now all binary data transportation is through AMF3 protocol
• Multipoint Publishing – Publish live stream from different network locations for time-sensitive content.
• Stream redirection handling – You can redirect streams like HTTP 302 for missing / alternative contents.
• Stream data access – Dynamic creation of thumbnails or video previews / snapshots
• W3C compliant ASCII logs
• Native bandwidth detection – Detect the bandwidth and serve accordingly
• Advanced seeking – Seek anywhere regardless of length of video or download status

Flash Media Streaming Server 3:

This edition is a special edition if you just want to have flash platform’s streaming power for audio and video but not the data related features or any other interactive features of FMS. So you can say that it’s limited edition of Flash Media Interactive Server. If we compare this edition with FMS2, than the major feature of this edition is no connections or bandwidth limits. I am sure all the CDNs and Flash Media Server hosting companies must be very happy of this. Personally I also see this as strict step against Wowza Media Server by Adobe.

Price:

Price for this edition is US$ 995. Due to this pricing Wowza had to reduce its price to 80%. Unfortunately there is no upgrade option for this edition if you own any previous version of flash media server.

What’s New:

• Unlimited Bandwidth and Users – No limits Serve as much your hardware can
• Performance Gain – According to Adobe, its 2x than FMS 2.
• Secured content delivery through RTMPE with 128-bit encryption
• Support For H.264 and HE-AAC for Flash Player, AIR, Adobe Media Player and FlashLite 3
• W3C compliant ASCII logs
• Native bandwidth detection – Detect the bandwidth and serve accordingly
• Advanced seeking – Seek anywhere regardless of length of video or download status

Download Link:

Flash Media Interactive Server 3 – Developer Edition

So that’s good news for flash media server developers. But unfortunately no Screensharing support yet from Adobe to create great collaborative applications like Acrobat Connect Pro.

Adobe recently update the flash player version to 9.0.115.0 to fix some serious security issues found in last version of flash player 9.0.48.

So what are the changes in new version of flash player for flash developer perspective? Here are the issues that personally affect me and my team.

Stricter method to interpret crossdomain policy files:

1. Policy files formatting are now stricter. Here are the cases, which can cause rejection of your crossdomain policy files:
   
   1. Any extra content before or after the start and closing tag cross-domain-policy.
   2. Top level XML tag is not cross-domain-policy.
   3. Any text other than comments found inside any tag of the policy file.
2. Adobe published new schemas for various cases of crossdomain policies as following:
   
   1. Generic Schema: http://www.adobe.com/xml/schemas/PolicyFile.xsd
   2. Schema for FTP: http://www.adobe.com/xml/schemas/PolicyFileFtp.xsd
   3. Schema for HTTP: http://www.adobe.com/xml/schemas/PolicyFileHttp.xsd
   4. Schema for HTTPS: http://www.adobe.com/xml/schemas/PolicyFileHttps.xsd
   5. Schema for Socket communication: http://www.adobe.com/xml/schemas/PolicyFileSocket.xsd
3. Same domain redirection of policy files
   
   1. Redirection inside same domain is still allowed in new flash player version.
   2. If policy file located at domain/a/crossdomainpolicy.xml is set to redirect at domain/b/crossdomainpolicy.xml, in that case it would treated policy file for folder domain/b not domain/a.
4. Content-type whitelist
   
   1. Policy file’s content-type must be either text/* or application/xml or application/xhtml+xml
   2. Flash player will ignore any HTTP policy file that is not sent with a Content-Type value.
   3. Intention of whitelist is to give some assurance that the file is intended to be a text file.
5. Stronger socket communication rules
   
   1. From this player version onwards, it’s required to define socket communication port number in the socket policy file.
6. New: Meta-policies
   
   1. Meta-policies are defining which policy files are permitted to exist on a server.
   2. Meta-policies normally defines, which kind of flash player related services are hosted on this server and it’s sub folders.
   3. Scope for Meta-policies is for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and Sockets.
   4. Currently, its not too important unless and until you are super administrator of lot many flash player services like Yahoo! and Google.
7. Policy file logging
   
   1. It requires debug version of flash player.
   2. To enable logging, you need to edit mm.cfg which is normally located inside your home folder depending on your operating system.
   3. Default locations for mm.cfg are as following:
      1. Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\username
      2. Windows Vista: C:\Users\username
      3. Macintosh and Linux: /home/username
   4. Create mm.cfg if it does not exist.
   5. It should have following settings:
      1. PolicyFileLog=1
      2. PolicyFileLogAppend=1
   6. Line (i) will enable logging of policy files and line (ii) will continue appending logs instead of clearing log file if root-level SWF is used.
   7. After doing this, if you load any SWF file in your debug version of flash player, it should create policyfiles.txt in following folders according the operating system:
      1. Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs
      2. Windows Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs
      3. Macintosh: /Users/username/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs
      4. Linux: /home/username/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs
   8. Main message which is added in this log file is “Root-level SWF loaded“. This indicates that policy file logging is working fine.
8. Complete article on Adobe Devnet can be found here.
   

Restriction on unsupported function asfunction:

This was the main protocol to address potential cross-site scripting issues with some SWF files. As it was updated after Flash Player 8, it has nothing to do with Flash Player 7.

Downloading the update:

To download latest update please point your browser to here.

Interesting Links:

• Adobe Security Bulletin:
  http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-20.html
• Flash Player Update:
  http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash
• Flash Debug Player Update:
  http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html#fp9
• Flash Player 7 Update Information:
  http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=d9c2fe33&sliceId=2
• Adobe Devnet article about crossdomain policies:
  http://www.adobe.com/go/strict_policy_files
• Code examples about new crossdomain polices, maintained by Adobe:
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/socket_policy_files.html