As you may have heard, Adobe has announced the release of Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Mike Chambers and the Adobe crew have announced the Europe version of the onAIR bus tour. Full details are on the onAIR site. You can also read Mike's blog post about the event. Lastly, there's a Facebook page with tour info.

Adobe's RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The 615Flex user group and the Nashville CF User Group are hosting a special live event to share exciting new information on Adobe's platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You'll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive schwag and other giveaways.

Ben Forta's Flex 3 / AIR pre-release tour has already begun and the Nashville stop on the US portion of the tour is this week. Any Flash, Flex, AIR, or ColdFusion developers are encouraged to come to the event and learn more about the next major release of Flex and the new Adobe Integrated Runtime product release. Attendees are encouraged to register for the event so we can plan appropriately for the number of folks coming.

I'm pretty much copying the below announcement from Adobe verbatim. There's little I can do to make it better, and I want to make sure to get the word out. By the way, one of the stops for this tour is Nashville where the event will be taking place in the building I work in. If you are going to be near Nashville on January 24, I'd love to meet you at this event. You can register for the Nashville tour stop here: http://www.615flex.com/special-events/.

Go bag, man sack, man purse, whatever you want to call it, I first got the idea to post what I carry around day-to-day from the Lifehacker site. That was several months ago, and now that I've received my new Flash on the Beach TimBuk2 bag (thanks Ted!), I decided to reveal the contents of my bag. 1. TimBuk2 "Flash on the Beach" speaker bag. I won this bag in a charity eBay auction by Ted Patrick (Adobe Flex Evangelist) 2. Halls cough drops (it's winter you know) 3.

Ben Forta is once again heading to Nashville, only this time he'll be discussing Adobe Flex and AIR. This event is sponsored by several Nashville companies and is being hosted by the Nashville Flex User Group (615Flex). Registration for this January 2008 event has been opened to the public and is FREE! Interested participants should register fast as seating may be limited. Event Info and Registration: http://www.615flex.

Tomorrow (Dec. 10) John Mason will be presenting on fundamentals of Adobe AIR to the Nashville 615Flex user group. John will be covering topics such as the File system API, the SQLite engine, clipboard drag and drop, offline/online functionality and the AIR security model. If you're in Nashville, the presentation will be at Dealerskins, where I work. If you're outside of Nashville you can attend via Adobe Acrobat Connect.

With Adobe announcing the next beta release of the Adobe Integrated Runtime, it's only right that I offer an updated version of my twitterAIR application. Don't go getting too excited though. Version 1.1.3 has no additional features or bug fixes, it's simply a maintenance release recompiled - with a few required changes - to work on the new version of AIR. Download AIR Beta 2 Download twitterAIR v1.1.

The general CF and Flex community are invited to attend a Flex presentation tonight broadcasting from the Nashville ColdFusion User Group. We originally planned on doing this presentation in March of this year. Due to technical difficulties it was rescheduled for tonight. Theo Rushin Jr. will be presenting FlexTimer: A Case Study of a Flex RIA. More information can be viewed at the Nashville UG Web site.