Wow.

It’s been quite a fascinating year thus far; Adobe has really started getting serious about Flash, Flex and the developers involved. This year, we have seen two amazing additions to Adobe’s web-dominating arsenal – Adobe Flash Catalyst (now in beta 2) and Adobe Flash Builder 4 (now in beta 2). After some preliminary buggering around in both of these, I came to the conclusion that working with a beta version of any software to create enterprise applications is putting yourself on the edge of the cliff, and working on a version 1.0 beta is hiring somebody to push you over the edge.

This raises an interesting catch-22:
When a massive piece of software is released, the community has the onus to test it and give feedback on any bugs, requested features and expedience tips – however, if your beta software tends to be very buggy (and how could it not be? The SDK is huge) then how are you going to get developers to test your software on real, enterprise projects?

In any case, Adobe has really been playing the part this year. This year we have seen the release of the Flex 4 SDK, major advancements in the Open Screen Project, Flash Player 10′s penetration rate to 93.5%, AIR surpassing 100 million installations and the introduction of Flash Player 10.1 most recently. Other great things i’ve seen are WorkflowLab, BrowserLab, Project Squiggly, Slider previews, Flash CS5 sneak previews and Community Help.

For all of those unlucky and miserable enough to miss Adobe Max this year (myself included), there’s an entire channel dedicated to Max 2009 Developer talks… Go check them out!

Oh, and if you have any luck getting these videos to play in Adobe Media Player, let me know. That app is more full of bugs than a salad in Nigeria.