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](http://chrisblunt.com/blog/wp-admin/upload.php?style=inline&tab=browse-all&post_id=277&action=view&ID=278 “Flex Builder”) method I’m using to make HostManager 2.0. Maybe one day, Cocoa might adopt XML-built interface files…?