Adobe Releases Flex 3, Flex Builder 3, and AIR 1.0

Wow....big release day for Adobe.

1) AIR is Adobe's next generation runtime to build applications for the desktop. Essentially, with AIR you can build your application using HTML, AJAX, Flash, or Flex and deploy it as a desktop application for Windows or Mac. I've played with the betas quite a bit over the past year+ and this is exciting.

2) Flex Builder 3 makes building Flex apps easy. Layout and deploying is a breeze. It is also, as far as I've found, the best AS3 editor on the Mac. The alternative for me has always been to fire up Parallels and run FlashDevelop. But when I just don't want to be bothered with firing up Windows, FB3 is a great alternative. One pitfall, if you're using subversion with your project. I have run into some quirky things with committing and updates. I often have to remove my Flex project and recreate it after doing an Update. Not the most fun I've had. Of course, I haven't played with the final release - only beta. Hopefully some of this has been fixed in the release.

You can download AIR from: http://get.adobe.com/air/