After writing one set of Release Notes* today, I thought I'd review Adobe's latest announcement on the Flex SDK and Flash Builder 4 releases.

Honestly, the Flash Builder 4.0.1 update is irrelevant to me. I just haven't run into the bugs this patch fixes. They may be vital to other people, just not to me. The most important pieces that I see are the updated in the version 4.1 release and the coming "Hero" release.

The current 4.1 update resolves quite a few issues ranging from showstoppers to annoyances. You can see the full ticket list here. Personally, I think one of the best things that companies have learned from Open Source is the value of an open ticket system. We know software has bugs and since we're often the ones pushing the tools above and beyond what they're designed to do, it makes sense that we hit this bugs and can report them. Further, the SDK now supports Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 out of the box.

The Hero release attacks three main points: mobile, application skinning, and large application development:

Mobile is obviously a hot button to Adobe. And without wading into the Apple vs Adobe holy war, it looks like Adobe is setting in full-force. The skinning possibilities to take advantage of touch interfaces and the like are interesting. I'd like to see where they're going with that and how. Further, they've worked on the performance and optimization of the runtime. Until I see benchmarks of the new runtime versus the old, I'll hold my judgment but it sounds promising.

Next, we have some advanced options with Spark skinning. Spark is the theming component of Flex that can replace CSS. Yes, you can continue using CSS, but the value of Spark is how much more you can do. You can define shapes of buttons, add gradient filles without images, and treat your Flex component like the desktop application it came be. In the Hero release, they're taking it a step further and making it more consistent on the Form and Image components. Since Forms - and backend form processing - are 95% of what I do, I'm looking forward to this one.

Finally, we have their plans for large scale application development. As I've gotten deeper and deeper into Flex development and tested and added more and more components, I'm reminded of the ancient proverb best depicted by xkcd:

While the Open Source guy in me hopes the Flex team said "Oh, so *that's* what people are doing with it! I bet we can make it better!" I don't care how they came to the conclusion as long as they're working to make it better.

You can read more about the coming "Hero" release of the Flex SDK here.

* To be specific, the web2project v2.0 Release Notes were announced this morning.

Disclosure: We're working with Adobe and a number of their tools and technologies to see what might fit where. I'm under no obligation to be positive or negative with respect to any particular product or group.