Integration

It looks like Adobe’s main push in Creative Suite 3 was integration among all the different pieces of software, mostly among Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. Importing and transferring files into Flash is extremely easy, and for the most part creates vector graphics and transfers text properly. What’s that mean? You can do all your storyboards in Illustrator and transfer to Flash, which doesn’t have as powerful of design tools and options.

You can even paste right into Dreamweaver if you want to, but I don’t think any self-respecting developer worth their salt would do that.

Flash-specific Updates

Well, the obvious pick is the arrival of ActionScript 3, which allows actual class-based, object-oriented programming. Everything is an object now, and everything can be strongly typed correctly, rather than halfway. It’s a definite improvement over AS2 and it’s just a lot easier to be in there developing now.

The coolest new thing in AS3 is E4X, a new way of working with XML that essentially replaces XPath/XQuery, etc., and it’s built into the XML object so you can perform data selection inline.

Also nice is the new event model, which consists of attaching event handlers to objects that raise events, rather than using anonymous functions like before.