Flash 8 is currently in development and its codename is 8Ball. There has recently been a lot of dicussion about what this release will include and who it will be geared toward. The last two releases of the Flash IDE have been focused on developers. Therefore, according to Mike Chambers of Macromedia, 8Ball will be focused on designer enhancements.

Mike talks about this at his blog. You can read it here.

While I am a developer that does very little design, I understand the importance of designer tools in the IDE. I personally feel that the developer enhancements that need to be made are in the Flash Player. The following is a short list of some enhancements I would like to see to the ActionScript language:

1. File Upload API
2. Abstract Classes
3. Multiple Interfaces
4. Regular Expressions
5. Method Overloading
6. XPath, XSLT, and XML Schema
7. Native WebServices Class (I do not like the idea of having to put components in my library in order for the WebService classes to work.)

Check out my lastest article at Community MX on creating a timeline controller class. This controller class will alloww you to play a timeline animation forward and backward. You can see it here.

B-Line Express has just released a beta of its highly anticipated BLDoc application. This is an ActionScript 2.0 documentation generator. It introspects your classes and any JavaDoc-style comments to produce the documentation.

Very nice tool, check it out: BLDoc