Juan Sanchez and the crew are putting on the Skin to Win Challenge sponsored by EffectiveUI and Adobe. We want to see some really great themes and so Juan and crew decided that one of the best ways to do that was to give away great stuff for great skins. These skins are for Flex 3, so you can flex all the skinning muscle you already have and use some of the CS3 designer-developer workflow features.

Widgets Lab noticed that Wikinvest has released some interactive stock charts and that they look like they’re built in Flex. I’m a big fan of stock charts and while we’ve got a bunch of charts out there (Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance), I haven’t seen good ways to embed those interactive charts onto a blog.

I’m interviewing Chuck for the next 10 minutes to ask him some questions about their $105 million acquisition by BT and how it will affect developers.

I’m planning on doing a Flex SEO contest update this week but I haven’t gotten around to it. Partly because so far I haven’t been happy with the results. A lot of people are putting a bunch of time into the contest (which is awesome) but Google doesn’t appear to be indexing things very well. But today I got a note from Justin-Everett Church that explained a couple of big questions I had. The first, and most important, was about deep linking.

Babbel.com, a Flex application built to help people learn a new language, just sent me an email saying they’ve raised their first round of funding. the size of the round wasn’t mentioned, but as part of the funding they’re also announcing some new features. One, they’ve converted fully from Flex 2 to Flex 3 (they have a Rails back end). They’ve also added some new types of tutorials.

Rob just sent me a link to PlayCrafter which is a suite of games built entirely in Flex 3. It’s a really cool, customized example of a Flex application and as you browse around the site you’ll see that there doesn’t appear to be a standard component anywhere. They’ve basically taken Flex and designed it well enough that it feels like a regular Flash application. The games are fun, the interface is nice, and the application is very impressive.

Juan Sanchez took the weekend to check out some of the new skinning capabilities in Gumbo (Flex 4). The first one is kind of an intro and compares and contrasts the Flex 4 versus Flex 3 model. The second one uses a new Gumbo build and uses some of the transitions. Both are well worth checking out.

Holy hell. I’ve been tearing my hair out all night trying to figure out how to make a fully transparent and chrome-less native window using the mx:Window class. Luckily, thanks to Bradical from this post, I found the solution. You just need to set showFlexChrome equal to False in your mx:Window component.

A few minutes ago we posted a new build of the Flex SDK which includes a lot of the stuff we’re doing for Flex Next. This is your first chance to jump in and start playing with Flex Next features. A couple of my favorites are FXG and the new states model. Ely Greenfield has a good video on Adobe TV about the new designer/developer workflow in Flex 4. We’re making a ton of improvements around the designer/developer workflow.

The Flex Team is looking to get the community involved in the Flex Framework. When we open sourced Flex we did so in part because we thought that the community would do the best job of helping to steward it. I think we’re still trying to find a balance of how to get the community involved in future features, but one of the ways you can help right now is by fixing some of the bugs that are out there.