RegExp is a new native class for ActionScript 3 that lets you work with regular expressions, which are patterns that you can use to perform searches in strings and to replace text in strings. Natively supported by many programming languages, ActionScript 3.0 implements regular expressions as defined in the ECMAScript edition 3 language specification (ECMA-262). Specifically for Flash or Flex development, RegExp will most likely be useful for any data validation or search and replace any string.

For example, you would like to verify a string contains the letters "AS", you would do

The regular expression to see if a string contains the letter "AS" is /AS/ (remember the '/' before and '/' after the expression), and the above function defines a new RegExp Object and test it against a variable called sString.

There are a lot more complicated regular expression syntax, you can start from the Adobe AS3 LiveDocs here to learn more. Here's a class we made to do simple form validation for AS3:

Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds.

Some video sharing sites already started implementing the player including Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/highdef)

Event highlights include:

• 50 + presentations and panels
• Presentations from Adobe, bigspaceship.com (Joshua Hirsch), Blitz (Ivan Todorov), Hello Design (David Lai) Trailer Park (Marcelo Guerra and Jason Seigler) and others
• Pre-festival workshops
• Free ‘Get A Job’ evening event
• Parties and other networking opportunities

For event details, go to http://www.fitc.ca/hollywood, and enter "hotshop20" to get 20% off

Renowned Flash Instructor and author of the "Essential Actionscript 3.0" Colin Moock is doing an intensive full day of AS3 Training in 10 cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, London, and more..

Don't miss it and go sign up now!  http://www.adobeas3tour.com/

The new Flash player Update 3 Beta 1 (build 9.0.60.120) has some of the biggest improvements I have seen. Download here.

Most notably, it has the new mipmaps support which will significantly improve the quality and rendering of bitmaps for Papervision 3D content. Another one that I am really excited about is multi-threaded video decoding, which means 1080p video is now possible and also full-screen mode with hardware scaling which leverages DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on OSX.

Read more here , and Full-screen mode HW here