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Radek Gulchalski has blogged about his recent conversation with Ben Forta, specifically that Adobe has decided that it cannot justify continuing development of Flex Builder for Linux.

I find this very disappointing, especially in the wake of their heavily touted claims of commitment to their Linux Flash users. How can software be given the cross-platform title when you cannot debug and profile on all of the “supported” platforms?

My $0.02 is that if Adobe would have followed suit with the rest of the Eclipse mainstream and written Flex Builder as a Java-based plugin and ditched the platform native dependencies, then this wouldn’t be an issue. Maybe i’m just being naive…

Help save the project: Register for Adobe’s bug site and vote for the issue here.

Ted Patrick has some highly suspect blogging going on, posting what would appear to be the splash from the final build of Flex 3! He doesn’t say what this means, but one can make assumptions Very exciting stuff here!

I’ve been working a lot in Flex 2/3 and Adobe Integrated Runtime over the past year (which is why my blog has been so neglected), and finally got around to making an example application that shows off some of the capabilities of Adobe AIR. I’d like to introduce Cheapo!, an AIR-based deal-site monitoring application. It runs in your system tray (yeah… windows systems are currently the only supported. It does run on a mac, but there are some glitches with menus — I’m fixing these shortly) and alerts you once an update has been posted to one of several deal sites. In reality, it’s nothing more than a glorified RSS reader with some customized styling. In it’s current release, it’s a closed source application because it’s a customized list of deal sites and I’m offering it as a companion application on a few other sites. However, I will be releasing the RSS reader/alerter part of it as open source shortly which will allow you to build your own RSS feed alerting application.

Currently, the featured deal-sites are Woot (with support for Woot-offs), Gottadeal, Passwird, Slick Deals, Buy.com and Amazon’s Gold Box. If you have any other deal-site suggestions, please let me know.

To run this application, you’ll need the latest Adobe Integrated Runtime (currently Beta 3).

Once you have installed the runtime, click this link and select “Run from current location” (or whatever the equivelant is in your browser)

As always, please send me feedback and bug issues and I’ll do by best to release a fix for whatever issue you might be having as soon as possible.

So there was supposed to be some big news from Adobe tonight @ 9:00 PM PST, but here it is, 7:30 PM PST, and it looks like Adobe Labs might have jumped the gun. You can download Adobe AIR Beta 3 right now!

Download Adobe AIR Beta 3