This morning, Adobe announced that the latest drops of both Flash Builder (the IDE formerly known as Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst are available on Labs.
Both have been well covered in the media already, and Catalyst (or Thermo as it was known) is heading for it’s third year of being demo’ed at Max, without a release.
“Design in Mind” was one of the core themes for this release, and these tools, together with the updated Flex 4 SDK, deliver on that to make it easier than ever create high fidelity, rich Internet applications that target the Flash Platform.
Andrew Shorten’s also released a little tutorial that you can work through to familiarize yourself with the tooling. In this tutorial Andrew shows you how to build an employee address book application that lets users enter search criteria and view a list of results fetched from a database (via a ColdFusion service), from which they can select an employee to get their full contact information. The completed application could work either as a browser-based application (using Adobe Flash Player) or a desktop application (using Adobe AIR).
So, if you haven’t already, head over to the labs and check them out, they are certainly interesting tools.
