Adobe Apollo is now AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime and the easiest way to develop for AIR is Flex Builder 3 (beta). The Flex 3 SDK is also available on Adobe Labs with nightly builds as well as a public bugbase. There are quite a few changes between the Apollo Alpha (aka "M3") and the new AIR (aka "M4") builds so you'll have to make some source code changes to rebuild your Apollo apps.

Congratulations to Chris Schmitz! He snapped the site at 999,999 and provided an exact timestamp, per the contest rules! Thank you to all the other folks who entered - I had about dozen entries in total, with half of those being within a very narrow window, around quarter past midnight! Nearly 1,000,000 visitors have come to An Architect's View since I started blogging in June 2002. Dan Wilson suggested that I run a contest for the millionth visitor and then donated a prize so here's the contest!

I went to Rob Gonda's talk on Cairngorm at cf.Objective() and, whilst it was an excellent talk, it just added more weight to my feelings about Cairngorm: it's a lot of work. Joe Rinehart showed off a new project at cf.Objective(), which aims to brings the ease of use of Model-Glue to Flex. He showed me an example that he'd converted from Cairngorm to his nascent "MG:F" and it was definitely an improvement.

Adobe just announced their plans to release the source code for Adobe Flex as open source. You can read more details on Adobe Labs. The Mozilla Public License will be used to cover the source the AS3 Flex SDK (available in source form since the release of Flex 2) as well as the Java source for the AS3 and MXML compilers, the debugger and the core AS3 libraries from the SDK. Most of the infrastructure should be in place by the summer with a full transition to open source by the end of 2007.

Via Ryan Stewart's blog (interesting commentary there), the folks at Virtual Ubiquity have blogged about why they chose Flash over AJAX for their forthcoming Buzzword product - "the first real word processor for the web". If you haven't seen Buzzword - which they've demo'd a few times now - check out the screen shots on their main web site. It's very, very slick.

Now here's a conference I wish I could attend: Web on the Piste - The Ultimate Conference for Rich Internet Technologies! Mid-Winter in Queenstown, New Zealand (August 22/23), organized by Straker Interactive (makers of ShadoCMS) with Adobe and Gruden as the major sponsors, and a stellar speaker list, this will be full of Flex, AJAX, Apollo (and ColdFusion) goodness.

CFLEX, the Community Flex website, is running a survey about your level of Flex usage and your plans for Flex. The survey will help "Evangelists (both independent supporters of Flex, Flex activists, Community Experts, and Adobe employed Evangelists) to focus their efforts".

You can now find Ryan Stewart and Jeff Houser's new podcast, The Flex Show, on iTunes via this music store link.

Ted Patrick notes that there are only a handful of tickets left for the 360Flex conference in March (5-7, San Jose). It's only $100 and it's packed full of Flexy goodness! See you there!

Ted Patrick has posted details about a free event in San Francisco in about two weeks, where you can meet the product team. It should draw a lot of local Flexers too so it will be a good opportunity for networking as well. And with Ted in charge, it should be fun!