FlashMoto is the latest in a small group of content management systems dedicated to Flash development. They claim its the first CMS built with ActionScript 3 and realized as a Flex RIA. CMS’ aimed at editing Flash content have traditionally been pretty lacklustre (to put in politely), so lets see how FlashMoto fairs.

Key features

• - Advanced WYSIWYG Editor
• - Built in SEO & deeplinking
• - Video, MP3 player, form builder and gallery components
• - File and font browser/uploader
• - Library of ready made templates (at an additional cost)

HYPE is a “visual” framework conceived by Branden Hall & Joshua Davis with the rather lovely goal of making AS3 more accessible to designers.

Flash has matured incredibly in the past decade, but it has done so in a way that has blocked non-developers from even getting started. The simple fact of the matter is that with older versions of Flash you could learn the tool and how to program ActionScript almost entirely through creative play. With the latest iterations, unless you have a background in object-oriented programming, that method of learning by doing is simply not an option. This is where HYPE comes in.

This rings true with me as I know many former designer/coders who have simply given up with AS3. HYPE really does makes complex animations\interactions much easier to build. The only downside is you do have to invest a little time learning the language of the framework itself, but really this is very small price to pay.

The truly excellent Greensock tweening platform has hit another milestone in the form of its version 11 release. We have been using tweenMax exclusively for sometime now and can not recommend it enough. If you are still using tweener, or perhaps Adobes own offering, give Greensock a run and you will be amazed by the speed and flexibility of the platform.

New features include TweenNano: a ridiculously small (1.6k) tweening engine and TimelineLite\Max which make managing sequences and tweening groups mind numbingly simple.

Its been a long time coming, but Flash has finally made it onto the iPhone – in the form of, wait for it – standalone applications. For reasons beyond us (obviously not technical), there is still no Flash Plugin runtime for the iPhone version of Safari. Nevertheless this is good news for Flash developers as it provides new opportunities developing for an established platform.

Some sample applications are already on the App Store, made with an pre-release version of Flash CS5, which exports/converts Flash projects into “native” iPhone apps. It will be interesting to see how these perform as traditionally anything built with Flash is quite resource hungry (compared to truly native applications) .