Kevin Hoyt from Adobe spoke to the NM Adobe Users Group yesterday with a pre-release presentation about Flex 3. (He declined to give an exact release date, but it won’t be long.) He also talked about AIR a bit.
He showed off the new features of Flex 3, naturally. Some of the more impressive have to do with custom data rendering and really cool things that can be done with charts using data sets.
He also pointed out that people who have CS 3 software can export documents from Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, and Illustrator as Flex files or as AIR files.
In this photo, Kevin is talking in front of the Flex 3 workspace and explaining the graphics you see that he made in about 30 seconds.
AIR was interesting. It’s an open source freebie and can be created without any Adobe software. AIR is used for is to take web developer skills such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash and use them to create desktop applications. Of course, Adobe wants you to do that using the tools in Flex, and Kevin showed a slick eBay desktop app that was created just that way. You can drag and drop files from your computer into this eBay desktop app, then upload it after you’re through working. Sure sounds easier than trying to create a product page using eBay’s online tools.
As always at NMAUG meetings, there was great schwag, including a full Creative Suite CS 3 and an IOU for the professional version of Flex 3 when it releases. There were books, tee shirts and all sorts of other gifts.
There are more photos at Flickr from the event. The event took place in the ARTS Lab at UNM, a room where they film using green screens and the lighting was interesting. I took some shots using the “twilight” setting on my camera of NMAUG’s Elaine and Becky that turned out really interesting.
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