In case you haven’t heard the SWFObject creator Geoff Stearns and the UFO creator have teamed up to create a new Flash Embed kit for HTML/XHTML called SWFFix that is more DOM compliant yet works.  Its always been a battle on this front of DOM standards vs Javascript when it comes to Flash embedding.

This teamwork to make a common kit will help to consolidate all issues with this and hopefully provide a really solid platform for embedding flash that takes into account all browser and satisfies standards but also works all the time. Making it harder to vote against when it comes time to decide what technology to use.

Of course there have been libraries like SWFAddress (for deep linking in flash and back button support easily) that have been built on top of SWFObject that will have to be switched over that have large user bases and following.

Check out SWFfix (of course this project has been very quiet and is not public since Feb 6-7th) hrm.

Be sure to check out the APE physics engine for flash. 

The library contains particles to assign to movieclips that appy the physics.  These base objects can be extended in many ways to create complexity from simplicity.

APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) is an AS3 open source 2D physics engine for use in Flash and Flex. APE is written and maintained by Alec Cove.

CircleParticles
-fixed or non-fixed
-variable mass, elasticity, and surface friction

RectangleParticles
-rotatable
-fixed or non-fixed
-variable mass, elasticity, and surface friction
-corner particles that can be attached to other particles with SpringConstraints

WheelParticles
-traction and angular velocity
-fixed or non-fixed
-variable mass, elasticity, and surface friction
-edge particles that can be attached to other particles with SpringConstraints

SpringConstraints
-stiffness
-collidable or non-collidible
-collidable constraints have variable width and scale

Licensing
-non restrictive LGPL

 [demo]

Hopefully we will have a tutorial soon here using APE and some other excellent libraries released recently with the onslaught of AS3 code and kits that will be fluid in their frequency. Another coming physics library is from polygonal labs called the Motor Engine.

There are many ways to animate in Flash and the best way is always scripting, or I mean code in AS3.  Flash has grown up quite a bit and now has a very fun coding language in AS3, when programming games or animations scripting is the way to go. You can even do stuff like make a SMTP server/client using mime in it, ok maybe more useful is a binary socket asset loader.

The default mx.transitions classes in AS2 were good, there are much better filter and transition tools now in AS3 but also a bit more bulky than needed and many good animation kits have come along that help people animate with script.  This can be great for team development when architecture is set within everyone’s styles, animation packages for example help to make it easy to have common code so that people can easily understand it. It can be bad when it comes to flash development when you open other’s work if they do not use  at least some standard kits or conventions.

There are a few really excellent animation packages that you should know about.

The best AS3 animation packages

1. Animation Package (AS3 kit here)
2. Tweener (samples here like this papervision3d sample for 3d tweening)
3. Fusekit and ZigoEngine from MosesSupposes (updated as of late march early april development has started on an AS3 version – not sure of release so its sitting at third)

*All* of these kits allow for total control in a push mechanism to just push animation events onto clips in a dynamic way.  This gives maximum flexibilty for team development and easily changed transitions, or completely random movements.

Fuse has some nice stuff in the works for ColorFX, SoundFX, and even a PaperFX controller for papervision3D.