Students: Start Making a Difference

...in RIAs. No, seriously. We launched our Education Developer Center today. This is where all you budding underage Flex and AIR developers can get your free copy of Flex Builder 2 (and the latest beta of Flex Builder 3).

Maybe some of the text in on the site isn't written in the best terms for our visitor demographics, but if that's a real issue, we'll fix it as necessary. And maybe it shouldn't link to the regular Developer Center's collaborative advanced cookbook, getting started guides and wiki...

Well, it's a step in the right direction, anyway.

It's also got a really nice motivational letter to educators by Yakov Fain on why Flex should be taught in the classrooms, alongside Java or C++, or on its own.

Check it out, and if you're a student, go ahead and download Flex! For free. Yes, it's legal.

Adobe: Empowering the Future Generation

You know, I get a lot of email and regular mail complaining about Adobe's "high" prices for software. And I understand. Basically. So, every once in a while I'll have someone complain about how we're not helping the next generation learn this stuff due to our prices.

You know, over the past few days, I've taken a look at that area. And you know what? You people who have told me this are 100% correct. So Adobe took a major step about a week ago (sorry for the late entry) in announcing that it is preparing to give Flex Builder (the SDK of which, Flex, is open source) away to students and faculty. All they have to do is prove who they are with the general yada yada.

If you're wondering why we didn't pick Photoshop or Dreamweaver, here's why. Adobe is betting its future on rich Internet applications and AIR, which we encourage are built in Flex rather than in Flash (though Flex is just merely a branch of the Flash overall platform). If we're going after the future generation, why not give them the future tools?

Oh, and also, this gives us an edge over Microsoft. Like they'd ever give anything away. You know kids -- "Oooh! Adobe gave us expensive software for free! We love you Adobe! We don't want Adobe to go away, so we don't like Microsoft." Maybe a bit too deep, but the idea is there at least.

According to this InfoWorld story, it'll be on our website next month (which is, like, two days away).

Google uses Flex for version of SearchMash

Adobe has always liked Google. I've always used Google. I think we used to package some Google Toolbar thing inside Reader because Google offered us too much money to deny. Adobe Reader is in the Google Pack of software.

And Google is now showing more love to Adobe. They've always used Flash for Google Finance's charts, but have you seen the Flash version of SearchMash, Google's experimental search engine?

Actually, they created it in Flex, which is really exciting for us to see. It runs smoothly, it runs well, and it's not too resource intensive.

The search results are really accurate as well. I bet it didn't take Google long to make it.