With the 360|Flex conference at the beginning of last week came several announcements for new and exciting stuff that is coming in Flex 4 (and CS4).

The Next Dimension of Rich Experiences (360|Flex Keynote) Mark Anders

As this video alone is over an hour long, I thought I’d summarize some of what I think are the most interesting advancements below.

Flash Player 10

As Flex 4 will be built for Flash Player 10, that seems like a good place to start. The Flash Player 10 beta (codenamed Astro) has been available for download for a while now, and there are some very exciting new features. As well as the expected performance improvements (such as multi-core processor support and graphics hardware acceleration), there is the introduction of “Pixel Bender” technology, which allows you to create filters to directly manipulate binary data - be that bitmaps, video or audio - to create a wide range of custom effects which can be applied in real-time. Adobe Pixel Bender™ is already used in many CS3 applications (such as After Effects) to create powerful filters. But with its inclusion in Flash Player, it will now be available to both Flash & Flex developers alike.

There are also the signifcant advances in the drawing API to finally allow 3D in Flash. This includes not only the 2.5D that you get in some programmes, which allows you to create flat objects in a 3D space, but also a full 3D engine with bitmap-mapping allowing things like 3D games to be built.

The final thing that will impact us here at IE is that for the first time since Flash became part of Adobe, the text layout components have been re-vamped, with the aid of the InDesign team (who know a thing or two about text layout!). This now means that advanced text layout features are available, such as right-to-left paragraph alignment and typographic elements like ligatures.

All these improvements will also be pushed into the next release of AIR (codenamed Cosmo), to allow these features on the desktop as well as the web.

Flex 4 (Gumbo)

The advances in Flex 4 have been done (in Adobe’s own words) with “Design-in-mind”. This means a new graphical subsytem has been created to allow low-level graphical elements (such as lines and ellipses) to be created as objects through the MXML scripting language. This has a significant impact on the development workflow of Flex-based applications. Designers can now export their designs from (for example) Fireworks as an FXG file, which as an MXML-based graphical format, and developers can then read this into Flex. So speeding up the development of the application User Interface, and freeing up the developer to work on the underlying architecture.

Linked to this is the concept of skinnable components. In Flex 4, it is possible to create components in which the class files can concentrate purely on the data model, and then apply an mxml-based ’skin’ to it which handles the visual representation of the component, along with any effects or interactions. Again separating the design and development workflows for faster application creation.

Thermo

In recognition of this new approach, a new product from Adobe called Thermo is currently under development. This is a tool for use by designers in the creation of rich internet application UIs, so further removing the developer from the design process. Designers can import their designs from fireworks, photoshop, etc. into Thermo and then create buttons, sliders, scrollbars, and all the other elements from their designs. What’s more, they can then test the interaction by compiling the UI and reviewing, for example, the roll-over states of buttons. The pre-built user interface can then be passed to the developer for integration into the application, meaning that they don’t have to work out what the designer meant from their pictures.

More Flex 4/Gumbo information can be found on Mike Chambers Blog.