Just a quick update - i've been absent for a short while, getting snowed under with real life! But i'm back now, so lets get ready to rummmmmmble! I now own a fully paid for copy of Flex Builder 3 - although i will still be using FlashDevelop as i really like it, i wanted to support Adobe, and also have a play with the flex designer in eclipse.

     You've probably noticed it's the standard edition. The extra £264 for the professional version just doesn't seem worth it, i've spent extra money on these versions before and never end up using the advanced charts. I would like the profiling option - so i may upgrade at some point, we'll see how my life in flash goes first! Having played with it a while, it's pretty good - not amazing. The designer is ok, if a bit basic - you still have to manually add a lot of things and the help isn't always that helpful! Good solid product, and it means i can produce and release commercial flash powered products unlike with the free sdk (not sure where adobe stand on admoneytized "free" games - you could always ask them) - but i think if you use a product a lot, it's worth buying it. I'm a good advert for adobe's open sdk policy. Never used flash before, got the flex sdk, like it, started working on some projects and then bought the full product. Hopefully everyone is happy :) (i still think some form of basic profiling should be available on the standard product but it's not a biggie if you ask me!).

     So what have i been upto for the past couple of weeks? Well i've been working on a couple of games, and trying to build basic blocks for a handy game library. In the next few days i'll put up a library page where you can check progress and download the latest version. At the moment i'm trying to get basic features up and running, then the next step will be improving them both functionality & speed. I'll also blog some examples and tests as i go along - which hopefully show the library is useful and how it's improving over time. Since my flex builder purchase, i'm also planning on producing a couple of related tools for sprites/tiles which should make life a bit easier if you use my libraries. I'll also try and spend a little time on the site as i didn't know some many other blogs used this drupal theme! And finally get round to fixing that tag cloud that broke a few months ago :)......