The one good thing about linking to important posts a week late is that by now they have become enriched with interesting comments!

Mike Chambers noted these three posts discussing the new Flash landscape and what Flex 2, AS3 and Flash Player 9 bring to the scene.

(Many of you will have formed your own opinions on all this by now, but anyone who was waiting for the end of beta to start paying attention probably has catching up to do and these are great reads.)

Colin Moock — summarizes the latest batch of new releases, then provides brief advice for different categories of Flash user: AS2 Developers, Timeline Scripters, Flash Designers, Aspiring Flash Programmers, and AS1 Developers. (And now I know that if someone asks, I should refer to myself as a Timeline Scripter. There, I admitted it.)

Grant Skinner — writes about Flex 2 from the perspective of a Flash developer. (Spoiler: he likes it for the right type of project.) There is an analogy involving cows here that is kind of gross! Enjoy!

Richard Ziade — took the Top 10 approach to things he loves about Flex 2. E4X and CSS caught my attention, as I’ve been wrestling with a small project involving XML and styles and am looking forward to improvements in those areas. No cow analogies here but more good comments.

Remember that Grant Skinner will be joining us in Austin in a couple months to talk about AS3, along with Mike Chambers discussing Apollo, and a bunch of other friendly geniuses who will be able to answer any questions you have about any of these technologies. We hope to see you there!

As you probably already know, our session offerings have grown tremendously for the Austin conference; we now have four full days of content and four tracks. This corresponds to the increased number of interesting subjects in the Flash universe – Flash 8 and 9, ActionScript 2 and 3, Apollo, Adobe tools integration, and more.

We’ve always been proud to offer an event that doesn’t require attendees to pre-select the sessions they will attend, but many of you have requested a way of narrowing down the choices ahead of time. So we now offer a tool that allows you to better plan your conference experience. As you browse the topic descriptions, you can flag the sessions that interest you, and those selections will persist the next time you view the schedule.

Build your own schedule!

We will soon offer suggested paths for different attendee profiles, from designer to code junkie, to help you make your selections. We’ll publish links to these session selections in the blog, so stay tuned. Of course none of this will prevent you from changing plans on a whim – it’s the Flashforward way!

The lynda.com Online Training Library now includes a brand new set of video tutorials covering Flex 2. Flex 2 Essential Training is 4.5 hours of content presented by David Gassner, who led our Flex workshop at Flashforward2006 Seattle. The “Getting Started” chapter is free; the remaining modules are available to subscribers.

Registrants for Flashforward Austin receive up to a year-long subscription to the Online Training Library, so if you have already registered, you can check out these training videos today.

If you are interested in learning about Flex 2 and have not yet registered for Flashforward2006 Austin, you really should. Not only will you gain access to these new videos, but the Austin conference will feature over a dozen sessions covering Flex 2, ActionScript 3 and Apollo — and they are not scheduled concurrently, so you can attend all of them!

Press release follows…

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Sure enough, Adobe followed up yesterday’s release frenzy with a nice present for Intel Mac users today — a beta of the Flash 9 Player. Go get it! (Thanks, Emmy!)

Flex 2 is now officially post-pre-release!* Go get it!

Flash Player 9 is also finished!** Go get it!

Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview is available in Labs!*** Go get it!

We’re pretty excited! You can probably tell!

* Still no Mac version of Flex Builder!
** Not yet for Intel Macs, but beta coming soon!
*** This one has a Mac version — woohoo!