I arrived in Seattle yesterday for the second Flex 360 Conference.  I’ve been to a few conferences over the past year, and so far this is the one I have been most impresses with.  Upon check-in at the hotel, I was told that registration was being held at 8:00pm and to be immediately followed by free food and FREE BEER!  Awesome!  The nicest part of the first night was being greeted by the conference organizer, Tom Ortega, right at the registration table.  I get the feeling that this will be a very personal conference.

I’m looking forward to seeing as many sessions as possible, and if you are a regular reader of this blog and happen to be at the conference, I would love to meet you.  I will be the guy wearing the navy blue polo shirt with a Braxio Interactive logo on the front.

Flex 2.0 comes with a great set of essential components for building RIA’s, but if you have the craving for more top quality components, check out flexlib.  It is an excellent open-source component library at Google Code, that contains quite a few components that could be useful in your next Flex RIA.

If you are not using Flex Builder for your projects and are compiling your Flex applications from the command-line, you might be interested in this relatively new project on Adobe Labs.  The Flex Module for Apache and IIS module provides web-tier compilation of MXML and ActionScript files on Apache and IIS web servers.  The module lets you compile, test and deploy an application by requesting the main application file from a web browser.  If you have ever worked with ColdFusion or JSP, this is a similar technique that compiles and presents your work upon requesting it from the server.

One nice feature of Flex Builder is the design view mode where you can visually create your UI’s dragging and dropping UI components onto a canvas.  If your Flex workflow doesn’t include Flex Builder (ie. you work from the command line) you should check out FLEXible.  It is a sweet Flex application by John Grden that lets you visually create your MXML for use in your Flex projects.  Check out the screencast to see how cool this is.

Flex.org is offering to send you a free set of Flex API posters.  A former colleague had a set of these posters and they are fantastic (and huge)!  There is a catch though, if you want a poster set, you need to put a Flex.org badge on your site, or write a blog post ;-)

You’ve been eagerly waiting to get your hands on Adobe’s Apollo product and now you have it.  So what do you do next?  Here is a list of URL’s where you can find some great information, sample AIR files and tutorials:

•  Mike Chamber’s blog contains lots of great information about developing with Apollo.
• Christian Cantrell’s blog - Christian’s job at Adobe for the past while has been developing applications to test and validate the Apollo API.  Look for some great content on his site over the next while as he shares his knowledge with the community.
• Mike Downey is a Senior Product Manager or Apollo and has compiled a fantastic list of Apollo resources.
• Be sure to download the Apollo for Adobe Flex Pocket Guide.
• Finally check out Lynda.com’s Apollo training videos.

Good luck building your first Apollo app!

Lynda.com has added the Apollo Alpha Preview to it’s training library and they have made it free to the community in celebration of the release of Apollo. The over one hour of online training features Mike Chambers, Senior Product Manager for Developer Relations.

Adobe has just released the first public alpha of Apollo. Apollo is a cross-platform runtime environment that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. I have been playing with private builds of Apollo for about 6 weeks now, and I must admit that the Apollo/Flex platform is way too much fun! I hope to release my Twitter client over the next few days. I plan on releasing the source so you can check out how easy and fun it is to create Internet connected desktop applications.

Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide - an ebook by Mike Chambers, Rob Dixon and Jeff Scwartz - is now available for download from Adobe Labs. Hopefully this means we’ll be seeing an alpha release in the next few days.

ScaleNine offers a list of 10 Ways to Skin a Flex App. There are lots of great links to resources for skinning your app from CSS to programmatic skinning to 9-slice.