I first learnt about Adobe Flex a year or so ago whilst carrying out some research for my final project. Flex builder - the Eclipse-based IDE - wasn't avsailable for Mac, and despite several attempts to work it from the terminal, I gave up and resorted to a simple Web interface.

This week, I found that the Flex builder has now been released for Mac. It might mean that I am now finally an ActionScript convert - just playing with the tutorials to build a blog reader (in 20 lines of code - interface included) already shows how great Flex is. With Adobe Apollo on the horizon, it's questioning whether I should be coding in anything else!

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

One of the things I like about Flex is the MXML interface language. Building the Interface through XML in this way seems so much more efficient and manageable than the clunky Interface Builder method I'm using to make HostManager 2.0. Maybe one day, Cocoa might adopt XML-built interface files...?