When I first got my hands on Flash MX 2004, over a year ago, I thought AS2, new components, all the other stuff was cool, but JSFL just totally blew me away. So much so that I decided to write a book on it. I knew that once MX 2004 was released to the masses, they would all be swooning over JSFL and vast libraries of new extensions would appear on the web.
It took a while though. People just didn’t seem to get it. A handful did, notably Guy Watson, who travelled the world singing its praises at just about every Flash conference there was.
Finally though, it seems people are beginning to catch on. In the last month or two I’ve seen a whole lot more commands and window SWFs popping up all over the place. Behaviors and Timeline Effects are still dead in the water, as I kind of expected them to be.
The thing that still surprises me though is how few people have caught onto custom tools. You know, new tools that you can add to the toolbar. I guess they are a bit tough to program, but I think most coders would enjoy it. They have a nice event-driven architecture. Check out www.friendsofed.com. Somewhere there you can find Chapter 3 of Extending Flash MX 2004 (the chapter on custom tools) as a free pdf download. It walks you through everything you need to do to write a new tool. I challenge you to come up with the coolest tool ever!