The Official Flex Team Blog

Last year we announced that a number of positions on the Flex Product Management team were open – whilst we still have one position available, I wanted to confirm that the core team is now in place and that we’re actively planning for future releases of Flex SDK, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.

New additions to the team are Adam Lehman, who joins as Flash Builder Product Manager and Jacob Surber, who has taken on responsibility for Flash Catalyst.

Many folks will know Adam as the Product Manager for ColdFusion – readers of Adam’s blog will be aware that he announced last week that he is moving to a new role at Adobe, and I’m happy to confirm that he brings his experience and passion to Flash Builder. In addition to blogging, you can also follow Adam on Twitter where he’s @adrocknaphobia.

Jacob has moved across from the XD team at Adobe, where he has spent the last couple of years using Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder to prototype and implement user interface elements in a number of Adobe’s products, including the recently launched Acrobat X. Jacob truly understands and represents both the designer and developer viewpoint, which will be a big asset as we continue to refine the workflow between Catalyst and Builder. Follow him on Twitter where he’s @jacobsurber.

Regular readers need not fear about Deepa and myself – we’re still here, with Deepa leading Product Management for Flex SDK, whilst I take on a Group Product Manager role overseeing both Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

The entire team is heading out to user group meetings and upcoming events over the next couple of months (including FITC in Amsterdam and 360 Flex in Denver), as well as meeting with specific customers so as to get feedback on our plans for Flex for 2012 and beyond. If we don’t manage to meet with you in person then we’re always interested in your feedback and thoughts – you can get in touch with the team by sending us a comment on this blog or by joining our pre-release program.

At Adobe MAX last year we made public previews available of upcoming Flex SDK, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst releases . Since then we’ve continued to work on new features, as well as improve performance, fix bugs and respond to feedback received.

In addition to the public preview release, we also have a private pre-release program running that delivers updated builds to participants. We’re now ready to open that program up to some more people, so if you’re interested in trying out newer builds of Flex SDK, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst and are prepared to invest time providing our engineering teams with feedback, please complete the pre-release program survey.

Access to the pre-release will require you to agree to a non-disclosure agreement.

Thanks,

Andrew Shorten, Group Product Manager, Developer Tools
Deepa Subramaniam, Senior Product Manager, Flex SDK

For the past 9 months the Flex team has been hard at work building the next versions of Flex, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst. We are proud to announce that you can now download preview releases of all three products from Adobe Labs. You may have also heard that we also released Adobe AIR 2.5, which extends AIR to run on a number of mobile platforms. Together, these releases open up a significant new opportunity for Flex developers to build applications that span the web, desktop and now mobile. Here’s a quick snapshot of the new major feature sets:

Flex SDK “Hero” provides new mobile features for building standalone applications for mobile devices, additional Spark components and capabilities as well as infrastructure improvements that target large-scale applications.

Flash Builder “Burrito” provides integrated workflows for building multi-screen applications, improved designer/developer workflows with Flash Catalyst, provides enhancements to core performance, and includes a wealth of new coding productivity improvements for Flex and ActionScript projects.

Flash Catalyst “Panini” provides improvements which enable bi-directional workflows between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder, adds support for resizable applications and components, provides improvements to project-defined interactions, and includes a newly designed Components panel.

You can learn more about these exciting new releases by reading our intro articles written by our product managers:

Andrew Shorten’s What’s New in Flash Builder “Burrito”

Deepa Subramaniam’s What’s New in Flex SDK “Hero”

Narciso Jaramillo’s Mobile Development Using Flex SDK “Hero” and Flash Builder “Burrito”

Doug Winnie’s What’s New in Flash Catalyst “Panini”

You can download the preview releases for Flex SDK “Hero“, Flash Builder “Burrito” and Flash Catalyst “Panini“ right now on Adobe Labs. We’ve also included numerous samples and tutorials to help you get up and running more quickly, plus a set of videos that showcase larger features and workflows.

We are all very excited to provide you with an early opportunity to evaluate in-development features and to allow us to get your feedback. Please remember that they are preview releases, so they have not undergone the same level of testing as you will find in our finals, and therefore may contain a higher number of bugs. Please also note that they are not yet feature complete.  All that said, we hope you’ll enjoy working with the new features and are as excited as we are by the improvements we’re making. Please share your feedback with us through the Adobe forums (Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and Flex SDK) as well as through JIRA, our public bugbase.

Enjoy!

Flex SDK, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst Product Teams

This is the last in the series of feature sneak videos, highlighting features currently under development for the upcoming release of Flash Builder, codenamed “Burrito”. In this video we’re showing you support for override/implement methods…

Whilst we’re done with the sneaks for now, the features highlighted only represent a portion of what we’re working on for Flash Builder “Burrito”. Stay tuned for more information about when we’ll be making “Burrito” available and what other features will be in the release…

Several months ago, we announced that the next version of Flex, codenamed “Hero”, will contain new features for developing mobile applications. At MAX, we’ll be highlighting these new features in a number of sessions.

However, we know that you might want to go further and actually try it out for yourself. So we’re also hosting a “Bring Your Own Laptop” (BYOL) lab, Build Your First Mobile Flex Application, where you can actually get hands-on with the new mobile development features and tooling workflows. Also, if you bring an Android 2.2 phone (and the USB cable to connect it to your laptop), you can even install and run the application on your device.

The Monday 10/25 5 pm session is full, but there’s still room in the Wednesday 10/27 1:30 pm and 4 pm sessions. So, if you’re interested, sign up on the MAX website, and we’ll see you there!

Continuing with our weekly sneaks of features under development for Flash Builder “Burrito”, this week we’re excited to show you how Quick Assist/Fix will make you more productive when coding ActionScript.

Flash Builder “Burrito” is an upcoming version of the product that is currently in development – the final feature sneak (for now) will be posted next week. Enjoy!

We are very excited to share with the ActionScript community an ActionScript Code Coverage Plugin for Flash Builder 4. This plugin provides an Eclipse perspective that allows you to start/stop the code coverage tool, view generated code-coverage reports, examine source code and save/load reports. Typically developers will use the code coverage tool to see which areas of code have not been exercised during execution so that additional testing requirements can be identified.

The tool provides detailed line coverage and method coverage reporting, as well as highlighting classes that are not linked into the application. You can use the ActionScript Code Coverage Plug-in for Flash Builder with applications developed in ActionScript 3, optionally using either Flex SDK 3.x or Flex SDK 4.x, targeting both Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR®. A trial or licensed version of Adobe Flash Builder 4 Premium is required to use the ActionScript Code Coverage Plug-in.

You can access the plugin on Adobe Labs here, read documentation around using and configuring the code-coverage tool, and provide feedback via the code-coverage forum.

The Flash Platform tooling team would like the community’s help in shaping the product roadmaps for the Flex SDK, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Professional.

We would like you to complete a 15-20 minute online survey.  In the survey, you’ll get an opportunity to help us understand how you are using Adobe tools currently, and we’ll also ask you where we should take the products by helping us prioritize potential areas of investment.

The product management team takes these surveys very seriously and the results figure heavily into the decisions that we make about feature prioritization.

Please, take the opportunity to give feedback.

Thanks so much for your time!

Flash Platform Tools Product Management team

Following on from the previous feature sneaks for Flash Builder “Burrito”, this week we’re excited to show you a quick demonstration of code templates (also referred to as snippets) for MXML, AS and CSS code.

Flash Builder “Burrito” is an upcoming version of the product that is currently in development – another feature sneak will be posted next week. Enjoy!

After a long Labs alpha, Adobe is stopping further development of Flex Builder/Flash Builder running on Linux operating systems. We recognize the importance of the Linux community yet after studying the market opportunity for the sale of a commercial Linux Flex Builder/Flash Builder product, we have decided to direct future development toward new features for Windows and Mac instead of adding additional Linux platform support to the product. Linux developers will still be able to use the Flex SDK from the line command to build and debug Flex applications. Also, please note this decision is specific to Flash Builder and does not affect other Linux activities for other Adobe products. Adobe continues to be committed to providing ongoing support for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for the Linux platform.

Please read the FAQ for more details >>

Dave Gruber

Flash Builder Product Marketing Manager