It is always fun when you discover new product features that you never knew existed. This happened to me last week as I was looking into Flex 3 skinning. It turns out that not only can you use a single class with states to define component skin states (like “up”, “down”, and “over” on a Button) but transitions also work with these skins! This feature has been noticed by others as well. But I figured I’d blog about it anyways - because it’s so cool!

Adobe recently released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux and a updated alpha 3 version of Flex Builder for Linux. I wanted to show everyone how easy it is to build and run desktop RIAs with Flex and Adobe AIR so I recorded a quick video. In the video I use Papervision3D and a component I created called “TurbulentApplication” to turn an ordinary AIR Application into an application which pitches and rolls in response to the accelerometer values on my Ubuntu laptop. While most AIR applications work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, this one only works on Linux because as far as I know Windows and Mac don’t have a way to read the accelerometer values from a file, like Linux. If you have Linux (and an accelerometer) and want to run the application you can download it here. If you want to download the source code for the TurbulentApplication component, you can get it here.

Bubblemark is a popular benchmark for some of the RIA technologies including Flex, Adobe AIR, Ajax (DHTML), Java Swing, Java FX, Silverlight, etc. I’ve been trying for a while to create a new Flex version of Bubblemark to show just how fast Flash Player and Adobe AIR are. But I’ve come to a few realizations… First, you can make benchmarks say whatever you want them to say.

When trying to optimize Bubblemark I found a few interesting things. First was that IE (and some versions of Firefox) limit the frame rate of Flash Player (and possibly other plugins). This means that while the Flash Player VM might be able to actually achieve 200+ frames per second the actual visual result might be only 60 fps. And maybe this is for good reason. Why do you need a visual frame rate faster than the refresh rate on a monitor? You don’t. And especially not for RIAs.

Over the next few months I’ll be going around the world (literally) speaking about Flex and Adobe AIR. Here’s a quick rundown on where I’ll be:

Wednesday March 25 in Las Vegas: TheServerSide Java Symposium - Co-presenting with Eddie O’Neil from BEA

Thursday March 26 in Philadelphia: Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Porting from Web 1.0 to RIA in the Enterprise

Thursday April 3 in Bangalore, India: Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008 - Best Practices for Building Flex/AIR applications

In case you missed the Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour that went on around the world in January you can watch a recording of the session Serge Jespers and I did in Amsterdam. It starts out in Dutch but soon switches to English. You can skip ahead by clicking on a topic on the bottom left, then clicking the “Bekijk deze sessie”. Let me know what you think.

For the Flex 2 product pages on adobe.com I recorded a screencast of a Flex app being built in 11 minutes. For Flex 3 I recorded a new version of that screencast. In the new version I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component but extended it to easily support playing videos. Check out a demo of the VideoCoverFlow component and right-click to download the source code. For those trying to use the VideoCoverFlow component - the implementation has changed slightly since I recorded the screencast so check out the myTube application for an example of how to use it.

Today Adobe launched Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 – the most mature and comprehensive platform for Rich Internet Applications in existence.

The news of the launch is everywhere but I wanted to point out a few of the most exciting things related to this launch.

The Flex SDK and BlazeDS are now officially open source.

InfoQ has published an interview with me on the Flex 3 launch. They have also posted an interview with Kevin Hoyt on the AIR 1.0 launch as well as an overview of today’s announcements.

Almost a year ago I began working with Ron Hess and Dave Carroll from Salesforce on the Flex Toolkit for Apex - a port of the JavaScript libraries for Salesforce.com’s web services. Since that time the toolkit has matured and been used in numerous production applications. Today I am pleased to announce the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex. This new toolkit build on the Flex Toolkit for Apex and adds additional functionality for the new Adobe AIR runtime for desktop RIAs.

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for deliverying rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. This is great news for developers like me who use Linux as their primary desktop operating system. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux. If you are interested please answer the questions below in an email to helptesterairlinux at adobe dot com.

An article titled “From Tags to Riches: Going from Web 1.0 to Flex” which I co-authored with Shashank Tiwari has been published on InfoQ. In the article, Shashank and I walk through the steps needed to port a traditional HTML-based application to Flex. We use the Java-based Pentaho BI Dashboard as our example application. Our goal in writing the article was to make the process easy for anyone to try on their own. It should be easy to try it yourself — just download the code and other necessary pieces. Also, if you want to play with the end result, you can access the Flex application here. Let us know what you think.