To borrow the favorite word of a certain Time Lord, “Fantastic!” The latest update to the Yahoo! Astra libraries for Flash, Flex and ActionScript is like a shiny new sonic screwdriver for your AS3 toolbox. Several existing components got some important updates, and we have a plethora of new layout containers for Flash CS3 that we hope will excite the RIA-building masses. Additionally, we’ve added the new Astra Utilities library with some excellent non-component extras that should come in handy. Don’t forget, it’s even bigger on the inside.

New Layout Containers added to the Flash Components:

• HBoxPane and VBoxPane are containers that arrange children in a horizontal row or vertical column.
• FlowPane is a container that arranges its children using a left-to-right flow similar to a document.
• TilePane is a container that arranges its children inside a grid of tiled rectangles.
• BorderPane is a container that arranges its children by constraining them to certain positions, such as a top header, bottom footer, left and right sidebars, and a stretching center content area.

New Utilities:

• Animation is a very lightweight tween engine with a simple API. Powers the animations in Charts and other Astra components.
• Layout provides the core infrastructure for adding layout containers to a UI control framework. Not a ready-made component, but an abstract set of classes and interfaces meant to be extended.

Among updates to the existing components and libraries:

• The Charts for Flash CS3 have received a healthy update, including support for legends, many enhancements to LineSeries, and several adjustments to styles that allow more flexibility.
• The MenuBar component fixed a bug with dataProvider resets and can now be explicitly sized rather than only fitting to the text size.
• The TabBar component can also be explicitly resized and there’s a new property that controls focus and selection behavior.
• The Yahoo! Maps Communication Kit for Flex has been removed from the Astra Web APIs package in favor of the official new ActionScript 3.0 API for Yahoo! Maps.
• The Aquarium example on the Flash Developer Center has been updated to use the updated components.

Ride the waves of time on over to the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center to read the documentation, check out the examples, and download the new builds. Don’t forget to tell us what you’ve done with all our components and libraries on the ydn-flash group.