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

Doing test that how fast it updates with feedburner.

We are working on a complex product line for one of our client. The key issue was to load different products / SWF applications into a single html page. It was causing increment in memory used by the browser in the system even if one unloads the loaded SWF from loader. Technical reason behind this was Garbage Collector (GC) was not cleaning its content from it while you unload the SWF from loader. This stuff was working fine previously with AS2.

As AS3 is more powerful in terms of performance and all, it also has some strict rules to follow to gain all the new AVM benefits. Loader will not unload the loaded SWF unless it completely stops doing any activities or listening / broadcasting events. In AS3 there is also changed mechanism of receiving mouse move events on any movieclip. Now we require to obtain such events from stage instead of particular movieclip.

The only workaround to this issue is a trick mentioned by Grant Skinner, which is to initiate new LocalConnections with same name twice. As it will generate error, we require to use catch.
[AS]
try {
new LocalConnection().connect(’foo’);
new LocalConnection().connect(’foo’);
} catch (e:*) {}
// the GC will perform a full mark/sweep on the second call.
[/AS]

Thanks Grant, for finding the catch and Adobe should do something about this issue J