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Automotive giant Fiat, has just lauched an AIR application as part of an integrated system called eco:drive. Fiat owners of certain models can plug a USB stick into the car that records lots of data about the way you drive. This is then loaded into the AIR application for analysis to give the drive an eco:index rating. The blue & me technology is developed by Microsoft but Fiat wanted a solid cross browser solution, and naturally AIR was the perfect choice.

As I don’t own a Fiat I can’t ...

Adobe have announces the new Creative Suite edition 4 that appears to offer better RIA development across a range of the tools. You can now create Adobe AIR interfaces in Fireworks CS4 ready for deployment to HTML, SWF or Flex.

This is really going to open up the toolset to more designers which in turn gives us more cool AIR apps! So get ready to get your hands on the new Creative Suite 4.

Adobe AIR 1.5 SDK (code named Cosmos) is now being included with the latest Flex 3 nightly builds. Aiming to bring the build process of Flex and AIR tighter together. There are some great things mentioned like the new JavaScript engine SquirrelFish, and fixes for the annoying opening of new browser windows.

Mike Chambers has a detailed post on the developments so check out his post.

TO get you hands on the nightly builds head on over to the Adobe Open Source site for Flex.

Adobe have released an AIR app for packaging up RoboHelp.
There were times when I could have really done with this app in the past. So go check it out over at Adobe now and let us know what you think.

Yahoo have announced an API for their music service. Detailed on programmableweb the service is REST based and allows for JSON, XML and RSS responses. Requests are currently limited to 5000 per day although if your using AIR you will be caching your results locally. Should be interesting to see what apps evolve out of the music API. There is also a support forum setup for this API.

The new version of Flex code named Gumbo is now under active development over at this site

Check the page out for more details including videos on Adobe TV from Ely Greenfield on designer and developer integration within Gumbo.

You can download the latest version of the builds here .

Adobe have announced to prerelease testers that AIR version 1.1 will be released around June 16th. This is a small dot release that comprises of bug fixes, certficate migration from self-signed to certificate authority, regional installation dialogues and support for internationalized applications using double byte languages.

Adobe have released a Fireworks CS4 beta on labs in addition to a CS4 Dreamweaver beta that now has Webkit as the internal browser. I know that many developers and UI designers use Fireworks on a daily basis, so this will be interesting to see where Adobe are going with their latest products.

The demo is 48 hours unless you have a valid CS3 license then it is extended.

I know that many of you have been waiting for this but after Yahoo and ESRI, Google have finally released an ActionScript 3 API for Google Maps. Well this means no more bridging for us AIR developers and we can now develop pure AS3 apps for AIR with mapping from Google.

Official API page
Official API reference
Google blog post
Example Flash application

UPDATE Apparently the ActionScript Google Maps API does not work with AIR and contravenes the terms and conditions. This sucks big time and ...

Adobe has released the public beta of the new Flash player version 10 code named Astro. I have heard of some very interesting things that are going to arrive with this update and from and AIR development perspective it should provide even more RIA / RDA (Rich Desktop Application) options.

Some points of interest include new built in 3D effects, the creation of custom filters using the newley announced Pixel Bender toolkit and better graphics performance.

Read more detail at the Adobe labs ...