Today is voting day for people in a number of states so whether you're in one of the states that's voting in a primary or feeling left out you should head on over and vote for features you want to see in the next versions of Flex and Flex Builder. Please, make sure that Matt never has to do this to himself again. He looks like some crazy version of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Here are the instructions: Go to http://bugs.adobe.

I get an email almost every day from someone who is looking to hire Flex developers. Sometimes they don't even bother to read anything and they send me job offers not seeing that I'm happily and recently employed at Adobe. Normally the Flex market is so tight that I'm not able to offer much help. But recently I've been wondering if there's something in the air and it's a good time to be looking for Flex developers.

Yahoo is doing really great things for the Flash community. Today they released ASTRA (ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications), a set of Flex and Flash components that are meant to compliment the components that shipped with Flash CS3 and the components of the Flex Framework. The Flash components include some great things like a Tree Component, an AutoComplete component, an Alert manager, Charting and a lot more.

I'll admit it, reading Jesse Warden's post gave me a bit of nostalgia in thinking about the old days of Flex and the community. I can remember when Matt Chotin was all over Flexcoders. You could email at any time of day or night and he'd respond and help you out. Ely Greenfield actually had time to build components. The iteration:two guys were just starting with Cairngorm and had written the bible that every Flex developer knew by heart.

Ted blogged about Firebrand.com but I didn't get a chance to check it out until tonight and now I wish I would have waited. It's actually the most ridiculous premise ever: watch commercials over and over again. But they cherry pick the best commercials so it's one of the more entertaining RIAS that I've seen. The idea is brilliant because they've got a great user interface that keeps the branding of the commercial you're watching prominent. Think a Coke commercial is great?

I was playing around with the NativeWindow API the past couple of days and I ran into a roadblock. With Native Windows you create them and then you're supposed to be able to add stuff to the display list using the addChild() method. But when I tried to add any kind of Flex Component, it wouldn't work (reading the docs more closely confirmed that). Thanks to Sasha Magee from the engineering team I know why, and it's pretty obvious.

We've had a lot of great companies using Flash and Flex present at DEMO and DEMOfall in the past including EyeJot and matchmine. We even presented AIR at last year's DEMO and showed off the eBay application. I've been getting emails this year about companies who are building applications with Flex and/or AIR and showing them off at DEMO. As far as I can tell this will be the biggest number of Adobe-platform related companies ever in a single DEMO.

2008 is here and that means a lot of new releases from Adobe including Flex 3 and (finally) the 1.0 release of AIR. I get to do my very first user group tour through a few really great cities and I'm also scheduling some post-meeting beers in case you want to chat more or just hang out. I'm also going to be bringing the official Evangelist camera to all of the events (including the BeerUp) so I want to get as many of you on tape as possible talking about Adobe, the user group or whatever crosses your mind.

Congratulations to Ribbit on going public today and announcing that they've raised another $10 million in funding. I was at their launch party last Thursday and I got to talk t some of the developers as well as people on the team and I'm really excited about what they're doing. Om talks about Adobe's own VoIP plans as being competitive and in some sense they are, but regardless of that Ribbit is proof positive what can happen when you create a powerful platform.

I knew this was coming but it look like it's finally up. Julie Campagna from the Edge Newsletter sat down with Mark Anders and Steven Heintz from the Thermo team to talk about the product. There isn't a lot of new information there but it's still worth watching. I'm also uploading a high resolution version of the demo to the Thermo page on Facebook. I'm in Thermo meetings all week and there are a lot of things we're talking about.