As a couple people have noticed, the nightlies of Flex 4 include some changes to the component names. Instead of <Button> we’ve now got <FxButton>. I asked Matt what was up and he gave me some info. If you’ve been looking at the Flex 4 stuff at all you know that what we’ve done is create new “Gumbonents” that have the same name as old components. Up until now we’ve been relying on different packages to keep them clear.

Simeon Bateman has a really good post up about some of the changes that we’re making to the namespaces for Flex 4. Because Flex 4 “Gumbonents” are going to live next to the old Flex 3 “Halo” components, namespaces are going to be an important thing to understand.

I’m starting a new show on Adobe TV called Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart. In my first episode I chat with Matt Chotin about new features in Flex 4 and then do a small demo on how to get started with FXG. It’s a little out of date because we recorded it awhile ago, but there is still some solid info from Matt. And no, we didn’t coordinate haircuts or wardrobe, but I think we look pretty snappy.

I took some quick video after our talk at the Tokyo Flex User Group. It was a great event with really good turnout. In addition to the talk Mike and I gave, we got to see a talk about the Flex-Flash Component Kit by Taiga and a really, really cool Ruby on Rails/Flex integration framework called Dango. It basically lets you do BlazeDS-like communication but using Rails and JSON. I’m messing with it this week and will try to do a blog post soon.

I’m going to make a confession. As a Platform Evangelist, I didn’t always do a great job of pitching CS3. It makes pretty much all the money at Adobe, and coming from the platform, which makes very little, I always realized I should have been more respectful.

So we officially announced CS4 today. Mostly this is just an unveiling of the suite configurations, the branding, and some marketing stuff. But we’re also starting to talk more in-depth about features and one of the big themes in this release is making developers and designers more productive together. You’re going to see that as you start playing with the CS4 tools and when you start getting to look at Flex Builder “Gumbo” (and the SDK), AIR 1.5, and Flash Player 10.

Mike and I are leaving tomorrow on a mini tour of Asia and we’ll be showing off a bunch of very cool stuff that you’ll be able to get your hands on before too long. We’re going to be talking about Flex 4, Flash Player 10, Adobe AIR 1.5, Thermo, and all of the cool stuff that goes along with that including FXG, Flex Builder 4, and Pixel Bender. So there’s a ton of stuff to cover.

Thanks to Simeon, I’ve completely fallen in love with the Sprouts project. Luke Bayes, one of the co-creators, is awesome and has been great at answering my questions. Basically Sprouts uses a bunch of Ruby tools and workflow to help you quickly create Flex applications. One of the nice things is that it also generates all of the test suites for you. Using ruby command lines and the sprout command line you can generate code, compile code, and generally do a lot of kick ass stuff.

I gave a talk at 360|Flex on how to use the new features in LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 to handle online/offline synchronization with your AIR applications. It was probably one of the worst talks I’ve given. For whatever reason I just wasn’t on my game. But I did create a code sample and I’ve got the slides for anyone who wants to jump in and try it out. I highly suggest checking out Christophe’s demo from which I drew a bunch of my inspiration.