October 17th 2005 | Jens C Brynildsen

Flex 2 and Flash Player 8.5 Alpha’s available

The MAX conference is just starting and as promised, Alpha version of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 are released. So how cool are they? According to the first reports, AS3 will change everything you thought you knew about Flash Player speeds.

The Alpha software is posted on a new sub-site to Macromedia.com called Macromedia Labs. Scott Fegette from Macromedia says "At its core, Macromedia Labs will publish early information and releases of products in development and new technologies in progress. Some of the technologies released in the Labs environment may turn into new products, some may evolve into new features of current products, and some may not have a life beyond the Macromedia Labs site. But all of the technologies will be available for you to evaluate and discuss in a highly collaborative environment."

In the future, this site will feature other Alpha software as well. Keep in mind that this software is Alpha - that means non-complete, bug-ridden software. Features you see here may or may not make it into the final product and you should definetly not use this for production work.

That said - the first tests with AS3 and the new player look amazing. Claus Wahlers just did a quick port of his DENG CSS 3 parser without adding any Flash Player 8.5 specific optimizations. Initial tests indicate a 12.5 times increase in speed. That's 1250% - a totally insane speed increase for code execution!

The Macromedia Labs site also contains a Wiki with the documentation for Actionscript 3. This is a very interesting move from Macromedia! The Wiki contains an ActionScript 3 Overview by Gary Grossman and Emmy Huang as well as more detailed documentation. A Wiki could be the solution to keep the documentation more up to date than it is possible with the current LiveDoc system, but they should definetly allow both bug reports and workarounds for these to be posted.
Click to download Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5

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