If you’ve been thinking about learning Flex but have found it either too hard, too expensive, or just too time consuming, have we got a treat for you. Flex in a Week is a free video tutorial series that allows you to learn Flex at your own pace. It comes with a set of exercises that takes you through the foundations of Flex and onto some of the intermediate concepts. Definitely enough to get you started! If you run into problems and have questions, you can ask a question on the Flex in a Week forum.

If you’re located on the West Coast of the US and fancy a gig working for Oracle in Redwood Shores, CA they’re currently on the scout for experienced Flex developers to fill a Senior or Principal Technical Staff role in the System Management Product’s Database Diagnostics and Tuning group. Candidates must be interested in UI development and learning advanced Oracle RDBMS features. They also must be experienced in Java Servlet Programming, DHTML, SQL and PL/SQL.

Odd sounding name, even stranger sounding definitions (especially when you check out the Wikipedia or German versions). Doof is a nice looking Adobe Flex based (”freemium”) social networking, casual gaming site. After some initial sign-up problems, I found Doof to offer a range of stock-standard games - ranging from arcade and action, to cards and puzzles etc. With the typical gaming-fare of leagues, tournaments and competitions to keep the more competitive gamer entertained.

If you didn’t get a chance to make it across to Adobe MAX in Chicago this year, Adobe Australia are holding a “Refresh” event for the local developer communities. This is your chance to hear first hand the about latest news and announcements made during the keynotes of Adobe’s largest single developer event!

I’m just about to hit the hay and thought i’d post some of the (now public) announcements which will no doubt be hitting the blogesphere tomorrow (or today) - depending where you are in the world. For those interested i’ll be writing more detailed, and complete outlines of the following posts tomorrow (once i’ve woken up). Adobe Acquires Virtual Ubiquity (Buzzword) - This is HUGE news as Virtual Ubiquity are the creators of ground-breaking online word processor RIA, Buzzword.

I’ve been very fortunate to be invited to speak at Adobe’s major conference event of the year MAX at Chicago. Apart from all the great new products that will be launched, events like this are always fantastic for catching up with colleagues from around the world, and networking with new contacts and partners. The conference facility (McCormick Place) is MASSIVE. It takes a good 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other.

One of the great things about attending conferences is that you often overhear little tid-bits of info that you may never come across in the mainstream (or even stumble across on Google). I picked up this little gem whilst sitting in on Thomas Burleson’s (Creative Minds) session at Web on the Piste in Queenstown, New Zealand.

If you’re playing a round of Web 2.0 Wankword bingo I guarantee that by the end of this post you’ll have a winning scorecard. All jokes aside, this second post in my RIA Motivator series aims to look at a few more of the main drivers (motivators) behind the recent popularity of rich internet applications (RIA). Last week we looked at the UX Motivator, and this week we’ll be focusing on how existing (and new) application architectures, combined with the emergence of Web 2.