// Playground of Jens Krause
ThunderBolt AS3 is a lightweight logging tool for Flex 2 and Flash CS3 applications using Firebug as its logging console. It’s open source based on the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
WSMonitor is a handy tool based on AS3 to detect memory issues in Flash or Flex applications. It’s simple to use and it’s free – including full source.
OpenAMF is a free open-source alternative to Adobe’s (formely Macromedia’s) Java Flash Remoting. It’s difficult to find any tutorials or posts about OpenAMF using AS3, because it seems that the OpenAMF project has stopped since 2006.
Anyway, at my current project we are using OpenAMF with AS3 (Flash CS3) and it works like a charm. But there are some important differences between AS2 and AS3 Flash Remoting using Flash CS3. To avoid running into any issues – particulary mapping custom classes – follow the following tips. But first of all thanks to Marc Schachtel for his great support on server-side 
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IMPORTANT NOTE [10/07/07]: Tweeners SpecialPropertiesDefault.as has been deprecated since Tweener version 1.27.62. All listed color properties (_brightness, _contrast, _saturation) are now included in Tweener version 1.30.66 and higher. For more information check Tweeners changelog on Google Code. Kudos to Zeh Fernando for the latest releases.
There are a lot of AS3 Animation packages out there, all with pros and cons. One of my favorite tools is Tweener AS3, but at its current version (v.1.0.1) it supports only few color properties such as _color, _color_ra, _color_rb and so on. However, you have the option to create your own special properties using Tweener.registerSpecialProperty. So I decided to write an extension for missing color properties _brightness, _contrast and _saturation based on the awesome ColorMatrix by Mario Klingemann. Check it out!
The flash.display.SimpleButton class provides only four states for specifying display objects these are used as visual objects for the following states: upState, overState downState and hitTestState. But I’ve missed a disabled state for an inactive Button.
This is the second part about the latest update of ThunderBolt AS3. ThunderBolt AS3 is an open source logger extension for Flex 2 or Flash ActionScript 3 applications using Firebug within Firefox.
A few weeks ago Martin Kleppe started a project on Google Code called Flash-ThunderBolt. The idea behind based on Manfred Webers blog entry “Make MTASC talk to Firebug” which describes a way for logging Flash apps compiled with MTASC using Firebug.
I’ve already joined the Flash-Thunderbolt project for coding an AS3 version. It won’t be a copy of the current AS2 package but rather another approach for using Firebugs Console API as simple as possible. Check it out, here are my first steps:
Well, 5 reasons aren’t enough and as a Flash Developer you’ll need experience with ActionScript 3 and Flex 2, too. However, Apollo Alpha is out of the door and after studying the open book “Apollo for Flex Developers” I’ve found my personal top 5 reasons for diving into Apollo as a Flash Developer:
Today I had an issue with skinning a ComboBox. Within a Flash form a ComboBox should be highlighted with a red border for displaying an error, but I couldn’t use ComboBoxes "borderStyle" property to solve this issue.
It took me several minutes to figure out how to do the simplest of things. I’ve dug out mx.controls.ComboBox and its super classes detecting a TextInput named “text_mc” located in mx.controls.ComboBase which draws the border.
Xtrace is a popular debugger console on OS X for logging your trace() data outside the Flash IDE. For easier handling I decided to write an extension for Zeroi that keeps your standard trace() methods in your code.