Steve Weiss from O’Reilly emailed me to ask what skills Flash and ActionScript Developers require, beyond the obvious, to progress with their work and careers. I tossed together a quick list, which wound up being longer than I expected. I thought I’d share my response so junior developers had a rough guide of valuable skills.

I love Adobe AIR! I think it’s an amazing platform with a huge amount of potential. However, AIR has one problem that could earn it a bad reputation before it has a chance to truly realize that potential – idle CPU usage…. I have created a simple class that will automatically reduce your application’s frame rate when it is in the background

I’m happy to release a free update to the Flash CS4 project panel that addresses some of the rough edges. Reskinned, external editor support, JSFL API, UI tweaks and more.

TextFlowPro enables you to flow a series of text fields together so that they act as a single text container, and still allow users to select, edit, and copy/paste text between the textfields. It should work with any text formatting, including different text formatting on different fields. It even supports tabIndex. I’m releasing it in the hopes people can do really cool things with it.

Ever wanted to be able to display multi-column text in Flash? What about text that spans multiple arbitrary text fields? Sure, Adobe’s Text Layout Framework will let you display multi column text, but it’s still in beta, not to mention that it’s a big, robust framework. TextFlowLite is a simple, light-weight class that works in Flash Player 9 with standard text fields.

Simple tech demo showing a 3D music visualizer using the flash player 10’s new 3D APIs. Nothing too complex, but the result is kind of neat, and it is simple enough to serve as a quick entry into using the new APIs if you’re getting started. It also uses the new Vector type in player 10…

In May I blogged about Adobe acquiring gProject from us. At the time, I wasn’t allowed to talk about what it was going to be used for. Still, it probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone that the new Project Panel in Flash CS4 is based on gProject. Some of the key features…

Adobe has announced the addition of the new Loader.unloadAndStop() method for Flash Player 10. This API makes it much simpler to free a loaded SWF for collection. It’s still possible to prevent a SWF from being unloaded, but it’s much more difficult to do by accident. Kudos to the player team for putting this in.