While working on Flash sidescroller stuff I noticed that there was no easy way (that I could find) to create multiple sprites from a single bitmap (something you'd do when doing a tile-based graphics layout).

Sooo... I made my own simple library called SpriteFactory.

Here's some example usage:

var factory:SpriteFactory = new SpriteFactory("assets/sprites");
factory.loadBitmap("grass", "block-grass.png");
var grass1:Sprite = factory.newSprite("grass");
var grass2:Sprite = factory.newSprite("grass");

Check out the project page for more information.