I’m about to hop on a plane for Chicago to attend MAX 2007. I’m always excited to meet real customers, experience their enthusiasm, and find out what we can do better. But this year, I’m extra excited, because we’ll be unveiling the new project I’m working on, an RIA design tool codenamed “Thermo”. Mark Anders let slip a little information about in in his blog, but we’re keeping it under wraps until we show it at MAX.

Well, here it is–almost time for MAX 2007, and the last post I made to my blog was just after MAX 2006. I’ve been a little busy We’ve been working on some really neat stuff to show off at MAX, so stay tuned. In the meantime, one bit of news–the Code Anatomy prototype I published in my last post is turning into a real feature!

I’m back from MAX, and it was a great time. I’m amazed by how much traction Flex seems to have gotten—granted, the MAX attendees are people who already love Adobe/Macromedia, but it was still great to meet so many people who were enthusiastic about Flex. It was also very cool to see the first public demos of Apollo—I think they really helped people understand why we’re excited about it. (Oh yeah, and I won a lot of money at no-limit hold ‘em.

Somehow I missed the announcement, but the Flash Player 9 beta for Linux is now available on Adobe labs. If you’re a Linux user/developer, don’t forget that you can develop Flash applications today using the free Flex SDK, which runs on Linux. I’m going to be at MAX in Las Vegas next week—I’m not speaking, but will be hanging out with the Flex folks (and hopefully playing some poker). If you see me there (my badge has my full name, “Narciso Jaramillo”), say hello!

The Flex team has started posting some free components on the Adobe Flex Exchange. The first one up is an auto-completing text input component. I haven’t looked at it yet, but it looks like it works the same way as a normal TextInput, with the addition of a dataProvider property that you can set to give it the list of possible completions.

Hi! I haven’t posted anything in awhile because (besides my usual laziness) I’ve been travelling a lot lately, visiting customers as part of our user research for the next version of Flex and Flex Builder. We did a mix of watching people work and showing them some early feature concepts, and as always, both parts were very enlightening. This post is about a simple but useful Flex component I wrote recently: the “self-labeling” text input field.

Brian Riggs of the Kiwi project has worked out a way to load graphical Flex skins at runtime. This could be useful if you want to create different themes for the same app without compiling them all in at once, or if you want to create an app like WinAmp that other people can skin without recompiling your source code.

Jason Langdon took my reflection component and made a new version that adds blur, which actually makes it look a good deal more realistic (higher levels of blur make it look like it’s on a less polished “table”). Very cool.

Okay, enough highfalutin’ chatter. This entry actually has (arguably) useful code in it. The reflection effect is destined to become one of those gratuitous UI clichés, like brushed metal and gleaming highlights. But hey, the kids seem to like it, so I figured I’d try to make a similar component in Flex.

Lots of people have reported the news that Flex 2 has shipped (yay!), so I won’t repeat the details here. (Just go download the free Flex SDK or a trial of Flex Builder already! You know you want to.) Instead, since it’s all about me, I’d like to point out an article I just published on the Flex Developer Center about designing skins for Flex 2 using Flash, Photoshop, or Fireworks.