So ever since Youtube vids and rumors and screenshots of CS4 first began appearing on the web almost a year and a half ago, the big question has been “when will Adobe Flash CS4 be released?” Well if you’ve been waiting like I have, you’ll be relieved to know you’ve reached the final stretch. Adobe CS4 (including Flash CS4, of course) will be release at the end of October, 2008.

Adobe didn’t say exactly what day in October, but there you have it. That said, you don’t have to wait any longer to buy it. Adobe is currently accepting advance orders for CS4, so if you want to be first in line to get it when it ships, there is no better way than pre-ordering.

Next question? Cost. If you want to buy Flash CS4, not in a package or anything, it’s stand-alone price is $699. Not cheap. And if you want the better deal, you’ll probably want to throw down for the other goodies, too. Stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator and Dreamweaver… all depends on your needs. To get all those, you’ll be paying for WebPremium or Design Premium at $1,799 or $1,699 respectively. Upgrades are cheaper, of course, but rather than me going down the pricelist, here is the link to Adobe’s CS4 release pricelist.

That’s all for now– except I should give you guys an update on the latest developments in my Flash tools… I’ve been waiting for the release of CS4 so I can make sure the new stuff is compatable on multiple platforms. I’ll have more free Flash Extensions available very soon, so sign up on the notifications list if you want them.

Okay. So over a month ago I mumbled something about the next few Flash CS3 extensions I had planned to release, and here I am a month later and you haven’t seen much. In case you’re wondering “whassup, dog?” the answer is simple: Clients and conversion. I got hammered with a lot of clients who wanted numerious Flash projects developed in a very short period of time. While this effectively prevented me from doing much work on my JSFL extensions, it did give me the chance to really test out a few of them “in the field.” And I have to say I’m pleased with the results. The CS3 extensions I built earlier saved me a nice little snippet of time here and there… and perhaps more importantly, they saved me the burden of having to change my focus from one task to another.

But enough about that, the real news is that in the leftover time between deadlines I’ve been busy converting my current Flash CS3 extensions to work as Flash MX 2004 extensions. This takes time, mind you, and most of the coversion work I’ve done so far is simply preparing my JSFL files so that I have a library of JSFL fuctions. This way I can port the functions over from CS3 extension compatibility to Flash MX and Flash 8 extension compatibility… starting with a set for Flash 8 and then moving to MX. So while you might not see any new Flash extensions for the next chunk of time, more are on the way and in the works. It just doesn’t make sense to build more Flash extensions without cleaning up an organizing my JSFL code library first. 

So, not much else to say on this post, other than “I’m not dead.” It looks like my time could be very well packed with another large Flash project, but I will continue to build the CS3 extensions I promised earlier, as well as start releasing a few versions of my extensions for Flash 8. Stay posted, and again, if you’re on my list, I’ll let you know when the new stuff is ready.

So, after doing the survey of Flash users, I’ve made few decisions about how I’m going to continue the development of Flash extensions. Even though a majority of respondents said they were using CS3, there’s still a fair percentage of you folks still using Flash 8 (Flash CS3 was spendy, so who can blame you, right?) so I’ve decided to translate my current Flash tools from CS3 to Flash 8. This won’t be immediate, as I plan to kick out a few other extensions first, and I have to re-write a chunk of code and test it, as there are some important differences between the two Flash versions.

Now then, about Macs. Uh, no real noise from the Mac folks, so I’m not going to test these on a Mac. If you use a Mac and you use Flash CS3, then the Flash extensions I’ve built should work for you. The key word there is “should.” Like I’ve said before, JSFL is a funky language. Test it out and see for yourself. If one of them doesn’t work, let me know and I might get to it.

As for the type of extensions people wanted, they gravitated towards the Designer/Animator tools, then library and file management stuff, and finally code extensions. I’ll build for all 3 groups, but probably lean more on the design and animation extensions until I hear differently.

Thanks again to everyone who filled out the survey. I’ve decided to keep it posted, and thus created a second copy to gather more answers. If you have any Flash extensions you’d like developed, or any other comments, feel free to take the Flash Extensions survey and leave your suggestions.