I heard about IDE Factory via AXNA a couple of weeks back. I managed to check it out today and I must say it rocks. If you have done Java development using Eclipse IDE, you are going to love IDE Factory. IDE Factory brings a lot of features to Flex development.

As you know, it's impossible to buy Adobe's software from India, I mean using their website. I have raised this issue couples of times in past. Actually, there is no India store and you can't even change your country to India in Adobe account details. Anyway, this time, I wanted to buy Adobe Flexbuilder 3 upgrade for one of my team member, I don't need it because I am very happy with VIM + Flex/AIR SDK.

I just read Ryan's post on Flex SEO contest. My entry for the contest is done in ten minutes. I have not used any SEO optimization technique in HTML, let's see if it gets crawled by Google or other search-engines.

Shashank Tiwari, principal architect at Saven Technologies and Oreilly network blogger, asked me of my views on Adobe Flex community in India and various other related things (jobs, startups, open source flex, java, ria, etc - all in the Indian context). Check out my two-cents (Interview) on O'reilly network. I would love to hear, what you guys think about it? Please let me know (comments, emails or IM). Thanks to Shashank for giving me this opportunity to share my views with a larger community.

I have raised this issue in past, Mrinal Wadhwa raises the same issue, where he is not being able to buy FlexBuilder 3. It's hard to get in touch with resellers, most of the resellers have never heard of FlexBuilder (yeah true) and resellers want four weeks time to deliver, four weeks? I can finish a good small project in that time :-) I wonder, why we (people from India) can not buy software from Adobe online store? There might be reasons but is Adobe working to solve/fix those issues (tax or whatever)?

Matt Chotin has posted some videos, where he creatively introduces us to most of the Flex/FlexBuilder team members and also talks about various behind the scene things. It's really nice to see everyone, once upon a time I used to work with them. In one particular scene, I laughed loud when Alex Harui says "No more questions". Most of the Flex team (Gordon, Deepa, et al) are very active, but Alex is like everywhere on high traffic flexcoders list.

Mrinal posted about the (1000+) numbers, that is, number of members in Flex India community (flex-india). It's really nice to see how number has grown, it surely validates that a lot more companies are using Adobe RIA technologies (Flex/Flash/AIR). Not very long back, almost same time last year, we started discussing how to build Flex/Flash/AIR ecosystem in India. Though figures are encouraging, I feel, we still have a long way to go.

News is out, everyone knows by now - Adobe Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 are released. Very interesting moments for many of us, specially teams who have been working for long time to make this release possible. I congratulate Adobe Flex and AIR team, thanks for developing tools/software/framework that makes our lives easier. Another thing, I am very excited about is the portal/website that would host all opensource stuff from Adobe. You can see Adobe Flex, BlazeDS and Tamarin there.