I’m in Austin at SXSW and I’ve run into a number of people who want to talk about Flex. That isn’t entirely surprising because Austin has a pretty good tech community but it seems like the people interested aren’t quite sure where to go and who else in the area is doing Flex. I’ve met a couple of people here doing actual Flex work but a lot more who are interested and want to talk with some local pros.

We’ve got a cool little application built on AIR that may be helpful to developers. It’s called the Developer Desktop and it hooks into our resources so you get a bunch of developer connection stuff all in one place. It includes a component explorer where you can view a list of the components available for download. You can download the component, see how many people have downloaded it, the rating, and in some cases, a preview of the component in use right in the AIR application.

When I was doing full time ColdFusion development I always got a kick out of Ben’s “Using CF” posts. It’s left an impact because to this day I find myself checking for that little .cfm extension. Today, I noticed it on the National Geographic mapXchange, a library of files that you can download into the [...

Picnik, one of my favorite online photo editors (all Flex) just announced that they’re opening up the features in their premium service to everyone: Now all Picnik users will have full access to our huge range of edit tools, special effects, fonts and shapes that previously were only available as Premium features. Free users will have this largess supported by ads.

Today is a pretty big day. To be totally honest, today is the reason I joined Adobe. Today is the release of Adobe AIR and Flex 3. The New York Times has a great article about what AIR enables and why it’s going to have an impact on the technology landscape. AIR is a product that will help bridge the gap between the web and the desktop. The web is incredibly exciting but the desktop is far from dead. And Adobe is in the thick of a movement that will help bridge the gap between web and desktop.

While watching the Lakers/Suns game I saw the add for The Ladder, the job site that deals in only “100k+ jobs” and thought I’d see what the results for Flex look like. The average salary for Flex jobs according to Indeed was about $77k but I get the feeling that a lot of people (especially those who follow the blogosphere) are making more and the The Ladder sites seem to bear that out.

Huge congrats to Loic Le Meur and the Seesmic team because they've raised $6 million dollars to help keep the momentum going. I'm a big fan of Seesmic and while I haven't been on the service a ton because of the fact that my Mac Laptop sucks, I really like what's going on. Sometimes video isn't the best way to consume information, but it's great to put a face to people and a lot more personality can show through with video, so I like the model and I like where they're going.

There's a great post by Rafe Needleman about Aviary and the gist of the post is that Flash is everywhere and Flash applications are some of the absolute coolest out there. As Rafe points out, the most creative things are happing on top of Adobe's RIA platform. The recent examples at Demo, the stuff going on with Aviary, Smallworlds and big companies like Nasdaq, eBay and Yahoo. So what the hell is going on? I think Web 2.0 is maturing.

Yahoo Maps released their Maps API for AS3 today which means you can start taking advantage of Yahoo! Maps inside of your Flex 3 applications. Jesse built a cool little application and according to him it's much, much faster than the Flex 1.5/AS2 version that they had previously. I'm stoked about the upgrade. Ted has a roundup of the features. I've fallen in love with the terrain mode at Google Maps so I really, really hope that Yahoo can incorporate something like that.

Last week I posted about Firebrand and how much I liked it. A number of other Adobe employees said the same thing and then there was a pretty good post by Niels Bruin about why he didn't like Firebrand. Normally I wouldn't do this but I get the impression that some people didn't like Firebrand for the reasons I liked it even though neither one of us drew it out specifically. Why do I like Firebrand so much? They built an application around the content. That's the primary focus.