Recent BETA Items of Interest

So, to delay my unavoidable participation in the initial “Flex/AIR/Flash” waterfall effect, I’ve waited till now to post anything about the massive new beta releases that have been available since last evening.

Flex Builder 3:
LOVE the new CSS design view. LOVE IT! I’m sure there are plenty more features of direct interest as well, but this is the one that really opens things up for me.

I initially came from a design background and gradually evolved into a developer as necessity demanded and curiosity gnawed. Having both design and development tools in the same IDE makes for a truly integrated experience. This is something those of us coming to Flex with a solid history of Flash development can really appreciate.

I’ve always found Flex Builder to be a bit too pricey to purchase for Fractured Vision Media. Until a few weeks ago, no clients had approached me concerning Flex specifically. With all of the new features in this version of Flex Builder, and the increased popularity of Flex over the past few months, it may become more difficult to avoid a purchase when Flex Builder 3 is finally released later this year.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR):
Nice new additions since the Apollo alpha. Drag and drop, clipboard, PDF, auto-update, SQL DB, connections monitoring… all great stuff. Not much time to use it yet- documentation says SWF files which are part of an AIR app will not need to rely on crossdomain.xml files… my experience is quite different :(

Why can’t I grab stills from a rtmp stream??? Please fix this, Adobe!!! Fix it in the general Flash Player as well for regular SWFs. If I own a Flash Media Server stream, and I own the SWF file accessing it, there should be some way to allow me access to the BitmapData.draw() method!!!

Flash Player 9 Update 3:
Taps into the GPU? Dual processor support? Multiple fullscreen enhancements? Almost more excited about this that all the rest!

Apple Safari 3:
For Windows??? Weird

Never much liked Safari on OSX- now people will be using it on other platforms too? What a nightmare this will be for debugging JavaScript…

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