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So before we get started looking at all the new features in Flash Player 10,
you go on and make sure you've set up your system so that you can actually publish
to this new version of the Flash Player. So throughout this title, I am going to be
using Flash CS4 to do my development. Now it's important to note that Flash CS3
doesn't have any built-in way of actually publishing for Flash Player 10.
So you're going to need to use CS4. Now in addition to that, the first initial
release of Flash CS4 had quite a few bugs in it and it was somewhat unstable.
Luckily the Flash team has released a free update to Flash CS4, which you're
going to want to make sure you have installed. To find out which version you have, you can
go to the Flash menu if you are on Mac. If you are on PC, you can go to the Help menu
and choose About Flash. And here it will actually tell you, your version
number. So here I have 10.0.2 installed, which is
the latest version. If you don't have that, you can go to the
Flash downloads site and this is at http://www.adobe.com/ support/flash/downloads.html.
And this page just essentially has any new downloads that relate to either the
Flash Player or Flash CS4. We could see if we scroll down here this Adobe
Flash CS4 Professional Update 10.0.2. So you're going to want to make sure you download
this either for Windows or for Mac and update it, and your Flash installation
is going to be a lot more stable. Now another tool that you're going to want
to get is the Pixel Bender Toolkit, and this is used to create new filters and
effects for Flash. So this can be found on the Adobe Labs website.
If you go to labs.adobe.com/ technologies/pixelbender, this will allow you to
download the free Pixel Bender Toolkit. So if I come into this Downloads part here
and click this, we can see that I can again choose either a Mac or Windows installation.
So throughout this title there going to be a few additional downloads of
things like ActionScript libraries, but we'll deal with those when we actually get
to them in the title. Now it's also important to note that although
I'm using Flash CS4 to do my development, you could also use Flex Builder
or even the Flash Builder Beta that's currently out to do your development.
You just going to have to do the little bit of extra work of actually turning my
code into class files for use in Flex Builder. So with these pieces installed, you are now
ready to start developing for Flash Player 10.