I've recently come across some good articles on Actionscript optimization, so I thought I'd share them with those of you who are Flash coders. If you want to make your code/animation run faster, then there's a good chance something here will help.

This article talks about optimization in general, including a few non-code things:
http://www.nbilyk.com/optimizing-actionscript-3

Adobe CS5 is out now, and we're using CS5 Master Collection, which includes a boat load of creativity and media production software. CS5 has really wowed us with some incredible new features, so we figured we'd share our favorites with you.

But first, for those who aren't acquainted with every Adobe app, here's a list of all the CS5 apps, and basically what they're for:

Photoshop CS5 Extended (the best photo editing you can get)

So you've got your self a shiny new web site, and now you want an icon for it? Just create a graphic sized 16x16, and save it as an ICO file. What? Photoshop doesn't save .ico files? Well, I found a few other softwares which didn't work well for my needs, before I came uppon this one:

http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

For my Flash projects, I've started using a debugger called MonsterDebugger which allows you to debug right from the browser, or if you're creating an AIR app, right from the app it self. This is great because the default Flash debugger doesn't allow you to do much if your app is embedded in a CMS (like Drupal or Joomla), or relies on some kind of server side language for input.

Ever wondered why your hard drive was so full? Ever wondered what was taking up so much space? Wouldn't it be great to have a visual representation of all of your files at once?

The best open source media player we've found, has finally been fully released (version 1.0). The VLC Media Player ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) can play just about any kind of media file you can throw at it. Even FLV files. If you're tired of not having the right codec to play video and audio files, you need to check out VLC.

For doing complex development with Flash, it can help to have a more powerful Actionscript editor than the built in Flash CS3 editor. I've been testing Flex Builder and FlashDevelop, both of which can export both Flash or Flex (Flex is Flash with a library of components built for making web applications). Both seem to have their pluses and minuses. FlashDevelop is free.

There are a multitude of free fonts out there now! How do you manage them all? How do you see them all to select one to use?

I have found this Font Viewer software from AMPsoft, to be very helpful. Plus, it's free! So it can't hurt to give it a try...

http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php

This is a nifty little application which is written in the Processing language, which allows you to draw stick figures and export them to Blender for animation.

http://screamyguy.net/sketchBoard/index.htm