Coinciding with the launch of the Flex 2 Product Line Alpha, Macromedia Labs went live today. The new mini-site includes a wiki, source repository, downloads, samples, documentation, release notes, video tutorials, and more. In the welcome video, Kevin Lynch states the site will include early releases of products, toolkits, and interesting ideas from the Macromedia engineer teams. Be sure to check out the pages on Flash Player 8.5 and ActionScript 3.0 (which now support Regular Exporessions!) while exploring Labs.

On a related note, the new Macromedia Flex 2.0 MXML and ActionScript Language Reference features a detailed description of migration from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0.

Mike Downey reports that Macromedia is already hard at work on Flash 9 (codename is "BLAZE"). If you own Flash Professional 8 or Studio 8, you will have access to Flash 9 alpha in Spring 2006 to use ActionScript 3.0 and compile to Flash Player 8.5.

If you have any ideas for what you'd like to see in BLAZE, be sure to suggest them to the Flash Authoring Team.