I have been spending the majority of my free time building sample applications in the pre-release of Flex 2.0 beta learning ActionScript 3.0.

For those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to installed the alpha of Flex 2.0, let me tell you that you are missing out on some of the best advances in RIA technology around.

ActionScript 3.0 is ideal for Object Oriented Programmers like myself to use. Definetly a step in the right direction and Macromedia / Adobe have built on the OOP nature of ActionScript 2.0 greatly.

Though different in many ways from ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0 has many new features which are obviously much to vast to get into in this post but I will elaborate on what I have found so far to be the most impressive:

• Automatic code hinting for classes, packages and members of user defined classes.

• Strict datatyping

• Package definitions (You now use a package statement rather than dot notation syntax to declare classes inside packages)

• init and unit classes for whereever a decimal isn’t needed - int is great for loop counters

• public and internal access specifiers
• flash.util.Proxy (this allows you to control what happens when any member of a class is accessed

• New XML class that implements the XML for ECMAScript (E4X) functionality. No more recursive looping!

• Code collapse

• Sound.computeSpectrum() method of the sound class (this method accurately returns an array containing 512 normalized values representing the audio file that is playing. You can use these values to make an accurate EQ but even more so you can use these values to controlanimation or just about anything else that you can think of.

These are just a few of the new features that I am happy to see. There are so many new features that I will have to learn them before I can comment. Beware that there have been many changes and alot of AS2.0 methods and properties have been either changed or deprecated all together.

I will post some of my sample migration from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0 applications as well as the port code to my portfolio site next week.

- Eric

I got some insider info on the official release of FLEX 2.0 beta. My company is partners with Macromedia so luckily for my team and I we have access to the Beta section of Macromedia.com and all pre-release betas so I plan to spend most of my weekend in Flex 2.0. The new beta will be available for download soon. How soon I don’t know specifically but I have been told that I will have access to it very soon. I’ll write more as this develops.

10.17.05 - This weekend I built a customized CMS framework in Flash Professional 8, php and MySQL. The purpose of the CMS is so that my clients can have the ability to edit the content of their web sites as needed. Version 2.0 will practically have standard MS Word features for changing fonts, colors etc. You can view an example of v1.0 by clicking the folowing CMS v1.0

12.13.05 - I have officially launched my latest side project which happens to also be the latest addition to this site - music.ericfeminella.com.

I created this new sub domain as an outlet for my audio production and sound design projects that I used to be involved in. I haven’t produced anything in along time but I figured I would share my music with anyone who is interested. Every now and then I will produce music for web applications that I am working on as well as sound design such as rollover sounds and effects to music loops for the site.

Feel free to check it out at music.ericfeminella.com and if you are interested in the MP3 player let me know and I will make the classes available.