June 11th 2007 | Jens C Brynildsen

Flex 3 and Adobe AIR (formerly known as Apollo)

Great announcements from Adobe today: The Flex 3 Beta is available, Apollo gets a permanent name (Adobe AIR) and hardware acceleration of video. What a great way to start the week!

In the days before Flex 2 was released as beta, Ted Patrick teased some of the new features on his blog. With Flex 3, he repeated this and it's been a blast to read his blog this week. Flex 3 features great enhancements in almost every area: components, file size, compilation time, refactoring, a real profiler, improved workflow, CSS design view, deep linking and back-button support, local caching of the Flex framework, Flex components for Flash CS3 - the list goes on. The final version of Flex 3 is set to be released in Q4 2007 and there will be two more public beta versions before the release. Keep in mind that since the Flex 3 framework will be Open Source now, you can even contribute to the development if there are features you think needs improving.

Ted also teased some of the upcoming Flex and Apollo integration. As of today, Apollo is now named AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and the Beta is out on Adobe Labs as well. The Beta now supports drag and drop, clipboard, HTML apps, menus, connectivity, command line arguments, PDF display and using a local SQL database for offline storage in addition to the features that were enabled in the Apollo Alpha.

Last, but not the least - the Flash player has gotten a serious update - it now offers mipmap scaling, multithreaded vector renderer and bitmap filters (with support for up to 4 cores), full-screen mode on Linux , Multi-threaded video encoding as well as DirectX (Windows) and OpenGL (OSX) hardware accelerated video playback. All we can say is WOW. We can't wait to test how this affects the performance of things such as Papervision3D!
Read more about the Flash Player updates here

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Adobe AIR Developer Derby

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Flex 3 week at onflex.org