If you are in the San Francisco Bay area (or not too far away), then make sure to check out Flash Camp this weekend, being held in the Adobe San Francisco office by the Flash team. This is an all weekend event that will go in depth over the new Flash Player 10 and Flash Authoring features. Its a great chance to get up to speed really quickly on all of the new APIs and features, as well as hang out and have a few beers with the Flash team.

I am currently on a speaking and press tour in Asia talking about some of the new stuff we are doing in Flex 4. One of the things that people seem to be really excited about is FXG and Thermo, and the improved designer / developer workflow that they promise. However, I have received a couple of questions about why we didnt just choose to use SVG instead of creating a new format.

Here are the links I mentioned during the SparkProject.

Lee Brimelow has put together a video demonstrating some of the new features of Flash CS4. My favorites thus far include the new UI, inverse kinematics (really cool when applied to shapes), new animation tools and features, and Flex created SWCs working in CS4. You can view the entire video here. You can find more information on Flash CS4 here.

In my original post on the new Flash Player 10 Vector class, I did a simple example that showed Vectors being slightly faster than Array when just populating and looping through collections. Below is another example that shows a more significant performance increase when using Vectors. In this example, I populate an Array and Vector with 5 million random numbers, and then loop through them and average all of the numbers. Running the test on my MacBook Pro, the Vector is about 60% faster: Vector 1.

As you have surely already read, we announced Adobe Flash CS4 today. I am not going to go into all of the details about what is in this release as you can find that on the website. However, I havent really used the authoring tool in some time (I barely picked up CS3), but I have really been enjoying CS4. It just feels like the Flash team nailed it this time around (Keith Peters has similar sentiments). You can find more information on Flash CS4 here.

Here is a sneak peak of the new AIR t-shirts (with a shout out to Flex and Flash). These were created by eboy, who also created the AIR 1.0 launch t-shirts. Right now, the only way to get these is to attend one of the developer events on Ryan’s and my tour through Asia. We will be printing more after that though and its a good bet that we will have some at Max.

Below is another simple Pixel Bender filter that I created last night. This one basically, converts an image to gray scale, using the ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 algorithm described here. Here is the filter: <languageVersion : 1.

After seeing all of the cool stuff people have been doing with Pixel Bender, I finally decided to spend a little time and start learning how to build them myself. The learning curve isn’t too difficult, although you do have to learn some new concepts, and deal with some limitations (at least when creating filters for Flash). The most difficult part for me thus far, is just understanding color and pixel math and manipulation (something I need to read up on more).

ActionScriptHero.org has just posted an interview that they did with me. This is part of a series of interviews that they are doing with members of the Flash community. Make sure to check out some of the other interviews, which include chats with Keith Peters, Mario Klingemann, Andre Michelle, Branden Hall, Grant Skinner and Ralph Hauwert (and more). You can read the entire interview here.