I'm heading off to San Jose today for the Flex 360 conference and I'm really excited about it! This is my first Flex specific conference and the fact that it's sold out means that it should have a lot of energy. That it has been organized by EBay kind of blows me away! In the past, when I've been involved in technology specific conferences, such as for ASP.NET, the conferences were always organized either by conference, training or consulting companies or by the company producing the technology.

Well I'm back from FOWA and, despite the poor quality of the internet access, my talk went well. Afterwards, I spent a bunch time talking with people about Flex and Apollo, and just about everyone was really impressed by what we're doing. One of the things I did in my talk was to build a Flickr browser in a couple of minutes using Flex . While this wasn't a new demo, I included it because a lot of people still don't know what Flex is.

I'm in London this week where I'll be speaking at the Future of Web Applications conference on Wed morning. My talk is going to be about some of the key things Adobe has been doing to improve the web application platform for apps running in the browser and how we're enabling developers to apply their existing skills to building desktop apps with Apollo.

During Kevin Lynch’s keynote at Flashforward in Austin, TX today, I had the opportunity to demo both Flex Builder and Apollo One of the things that Kevin wanted to do was to have each demo be a sneak peek of something, so everyone who presented had to have something new to show. Flex Builder 2.0 for Mac The first part of my demo was to introduce Flex concepts and I built the Flickr browsing app, which a number of us have done before, so that wasn’t new.

I wrote yesterday that we were really close to having a Beta of Flash Player 9 for Intel Macs available, and the code Gods did not let me down! It's available right now, less than 24 hours after my original post. You can download it from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/public_beta/. Check it out!

Emmy Huang has a great post about Flash Player 9 that you should check out here. One of the key things she mentions is that a Beta version of Flash Player 9 for Intel Macs will be available in the next couple of days. Emmy's wording on this was a bit confusing, so I went to talk with her for clarification. The team is really close and hoping to get it out this week. However, things do come up and so we don't have an exact date, but it is really soon.

nj, who always writes his name in lowercase, is one of the key developers on the Flex Builder team and he's started a new blog at http://rictus.com/muchado/. His first post is about an excellent article he wrote on designing Flex 2 skins using Photoshop and Fireworks. In addition to being a really talented developer, nj was the product designer for Flex Builder, so he really helped to shape its overall look and feel.

One of the things a number of us on the Flex team wanted to do was to create a unique Flex destination on the web. And so I'm please to say that with the release of Flex 2, we've also launched www.flex.org. You should think of it as a work in progress, but one that we hope will add real value to the Flex community over time. So please check it out! I personally am really excited about this. Back when I ran the ASP.

The final release of all Flex 2 products and Flash Player 9 are available now. I'm really excited about it and think that you will be too! Here are the details: Free Flex 2 SDK As we have previously announced, the Flex 2 SDK is free. This includes all of the Flex libraries with full source code, documentation, command line compilers and debugger. With it, you can create and deploy applications without limitation.

My boss, Kevin Lynch, was interviewed by CNET and the result is a front page story New.com story on Apollo. You can check it out here.