The latest installation of Adobe’s Flash CS3 Professional is now available. I was one of the many who probably did not choose to pick up the Actionscript 3.0 prior to the release of Flash CS3 Professional and instead are learning it for their first time. I must admit, I was not able to jump in day one and do everything I was able to with prior releases. The Flash environment has changed dramatically, for the better. Many of the functions I used to write now require event listeners, very similar to the MovieClipLoader’s event listeners, or if you’re familiar with AMFPHP, it’s very reminiscent of the return event functions. If you are not familiar with writing classes and actionscript files, Actionscript 3.0 will force you to get up to speed very quickly.

There are a plethora of really cool new options that users will find soon after jumping into Flash CS3 Professional. The user interface of Flash is very polished and now allows you to collapse the side tool bars while still being available in a small rollover fashion. Importing now extends to Photoshop and Illustrator files and preserves their layering, choosing import in Flash gives you a nice layout of all the layers within the file and the ability to check off what layers are to be imported. Any timeline tween animations can now have their code copied and pasted into the actionscript panel. The result of copying tweens creates an XML formatted tween code with all of the information in the tween such as frame rate, coordinates, geometrical shape information, transform points, duration, and is quite legible for those who aren’t familiar with seeing an XML coded tween.

The actionscript panel in Flash CS3 Professional is much more improved over previous versions of Flash. There are now comment buttons for the three different types of comments which save a little bit of time in rush coding. By far the greatest improvement for handling actionscript is the ability to collapse highlighted sections of code, this and how Flash CS3 Professional handles large amounts of script result in much easier to maintain code. Blocks of code over 2000 lines in Flash 8 Professional would often cramp up on my computers, and would be difficult to deal with unless I split it up into smaller imported files, but with the ability to collapse any portions of code not being concentrated on this hump has been eliminated for me altogether.

XML has been simplified greatly in Flash CS3 Professional with E4X, ECMAScript for XML. The XML becomes much easier to handle in Flash because the XML parsed is turned into something very similar to an associative array. E4X helps eliminate bad XML coding practices that have been found to be very common when people are given the power to create any type of tags they want, now the XML files are run through a validating parser to help remove XML coding errors.

There are many reasons to pick up a copy of Flash CS3 Professional. From the coding improvements, to the user interface changes, all of the new features combine to make this my favorite installation of Flash so far. The learning curve may be a bit steep just at first for new people jumping on the bandwagon, but nonetheless this platform is powerful for creating polished Flash projects.