Flashmagazine.com reporter, David Vogeleer, has just posted an audio podcast of his interview with me while at the FlashForward conference in Austin, TX. In the interview David and I discuss the state of Flash in post-merger Adobe, the impact that Macromedia has had on Adobe’s community relations programs, as well as some recent announcements in the Flash world.

Check it out here.

I’m not going to give you any details but if you’re planning on attending the FlashForward conference in Austin, Texas next week, make sure you attend the keynote with Adobe’s Kevin Lynch and a few others (including myself and Justin Everett-Church at the very end…).

I hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago I had the chance to talk with Kevin Schmitt from Digital Producer Magazine about post-merger Flash and the future of the product. The article just went live.

From the article:

As my regular readers (who most assuredly now number in at least the high single digits) know, I’m a big Flash guy, at least from a designer’s point of view (those programmer folks are nuts with their Eclipses and Flexes and what have you). I’m also a somewhat big After Effects guy, so naturally I’m curious about how the two products will influence each other now that they’re both living under the Adobe roof. I’m also curious about where Flash is going in general, so I was quite pleased to be able to pose a few questions recently to Mike Downey, Adobe’s Senior Product manager for Flash. And while the responses are about as tight-lipped as one might expect considering that we’re discussing a product in the middle of its development cycle, there are nonetheless some tantalizing nuggets about where things may be heading over there in Flash-land.

Read the full interview here.

If you haven’t already heard, for the first time in the history of Flash, we have released an alpha build of the next release of Flash on Adobe Labs. Our goal with this labs release called, “Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview” (AS3 Preview for short) is to provide Flash developers with very early access to ActionScript 3.0, released recently with the new Flash Player 9. This preview of the next release includes only planned new features that are related to ActionScript 3.0. Other features planned for our next release are not included.

Adobe Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview provides registered users of Flash Professional 8 with early access to the new ActionScript 3.0 language and the ability to publish to the newly-released Flash Player 9. ActionScript 3.0 and the new ActionScript Virtual Machine introduced with Flash Player 9 are among the most signficant advances in the history of Flash. These new advancements, made in Flash Player 9, provide a more robust programming model, achieve standards compliance, and deliver ground-breaking performance improvements…

Be sure to read the FAQ and the RELEASE NOTES. Also check out the Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview Discussion Forums.

Download Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview

I’ve been meaning to post about this for several weeks now. I’m very excited to announce that the uber-talented and extremely well known Robert Penner, best known for his easing equations for ActionScript-based animation, has joined the Flash engineering team.

Robert is hard at work on several exciting new features planned for the next release of the Flash authoring tool, code-named “BLAZE.” I can’t tell you specifically what he’s working on, but I assure you that it will be one of the most exciting new features in the history of Flash. He and several of our other talented engineers were tasked with two problems to solve: 1) make it easier to create complex animations that are re-usable, and 2) allow designers and animators to work better with ActionScript coders.

I’m really excited to have Robert join our team as I think he is one of the most talented and creative developers that I have ever worked with. He will be key in helping us take the Flash authoring tool to the next level.

I am trying to get Robert set up with an official Adobe blog so he can start sharing some insights from within the Flash team. Stay tuned…

I recently discovered this new polling widget via Guy Kawasaki’s blog so I thought I would try it out with a little poll about product workflows between Adobe tools.

As you might imagine, one of the big things that we’ll be focusing on for the next release of Flash, code-named “BLAZE”, is product integration with other Adobe tools - most importantly, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and Flex Builder 2. I thought it would be interesting to see which of these workflows you think we should spend the most time improving.

Good luck!