This started off as a request, but then I figured it out so I though I might as well leave this here for anyone else who’s having problems…

If you want to keep up with the latest version of Away3D,  download SmartGIT here: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/download.html;jsessionid=177A2DB1BF3B2A2E7146962E6D56E752

And once you’re installed it select ‘clone’ in the project menu, and you’re giving the option to specify what repository you want to clone.

What I was initially doing wrong was pasting in the URL from the Away3D downloads, rather than clicking on it in firefox to view the GIT downloads page, here: http://github.com/away3d/

So once you’ve clicked on that link and it has opened up, you’ll see there are several repositories available, the top one being away 3d core broomstick. Click that one and you’ll be taken to yet another page, this one contains the URL to paste into SmartGIT. You’ll see that you can select either https or GIT read-only. I selected GIT read-only, but I should imagine that either will work the same.

Copy the URL from there, and past that into the Clone dialog box in SmartGIT, click Next and then you’ll be asked to select a local folder for the selected repository to be cloned to. You can specify an existing folder, or create a new folder. (If, like me, you created a folder previously, and initialised it as a GIT repository, you’ll find you cannot clone into this folder, so you’ll have to delete that folder and create it again)

Press next and you’ll be asked whether you want to open the folder in a new project or in the current project (if you already have one open) I selected ‘new project’

Press next, and SmartGIT will start to download the files to the foler you have specified.

TADA!

PS you might want to also download the examples using the above method, but obviously copying the repository URL for the broomstick examples. I found that some of the old examples did not work correctly with the new libraries.