Ted Patrick presented last night at the LA Flex Users Group meeting about the upcoming release of Flex3/AIR. Here are my take-aways:

Release date for Flex3/AIR is in the 4-6 week time period. So the end of February, give or take a week.

$249 to upgrade to the pro version is an incredible value considering you get the memory profiler, advanced dataGrid, new charts, and a few other goodies I can’t remember. The profiler alone is worth the price of the upgrade.

Flex3 will be open sourced when launched. Personally I don’t think open source counts until Adobe mounts a webCam on Ely Greenfield’s forehead. Then, it will be open sourced!

Ted talked about AIR being a desktop platform right now but eventually becoming a device platform. The ubiquitous question was asked, “Does that mean the iPhone will eventually support some version of AIR?” Ted responded by saying something along the lines of, “I know Nothing!” and asking for another question.

So we are faced with this: either Apple is absolutely against supporting AIR in which case Adobe would want to deny any knowledge of Apple’s intent knowing that we developers will read into it that it’s inevitable thus creating a little more interest in AIR. Or, Apple is on board with AIR and work is being done to support it. But in Apple like fashion they have to keep this an ultra secret so that Steve Jobs can make the announcement on stage in front of thousands of sycophants. :-)

Bottom line is this: AIR will be on lots of handheld devices. Some of them similar in functionality to the iPhone. If it isn’t supported on the iPhone itself then Apple will wish it had when the competitors begin to take away their market share with cheaper more robust versions.

I’ve been saying for years that Adobe should build a handheld device that supports Flash/AIR and leave it to third parties to make the UI. Each would be identical with respect to hardware but there could be 10,000 versions of the UI. The cream would rise to the top.

I asked Ted about USB support in AIR. ( In case you didn’t know your AIR apps won’t natively talk to devices connected via USB. That’s because there are lots of differences in how each OS deals with USB. Project Artemis from EffectiveUI helps bridge the gap. Paulius Uza has also made some inroads in this department. )

Ted mentioned that Flash can see USB connected devices such as webCams and Mics. It isn’t impossible, just problematic to make it reliable on all OSes. But it’s something on the table. My hope is that it will be part of AIR 1.5 when AIR supports Linux.

Ted mentioned the internal app at Adobe that they use as a personal directory. It sounds like quite an amazing work and it supports P2P functionality. Basically an AIR client can talk to another AIR client, presumably anywhere. Ummm, I think that’s something that could rock the Casbah.

What’s really cool is that an AIR app can talk to a SWF or Javascript in the browser. That’s great for creating a bridge between a Flex/Flash/Javascript app and your AIR app. You could use this to sync data. For instance you could build an AIR app for offline work. When you go back online you open up your  webApp and tell your AIR app to update it.

Side story: while working at Xbox/Zune I did a prototype for a usability study for interaction between the Zune website and the Zune client. I enabled it so that the user could click something on the website and update something in the client and visa-versa. I mean this is Microsoft. They wrote the browser ( IE ), the OS ( XP/Vista ) and the client ( Zune software ). Turns out that they couldn’t do this without popping up lots of security warnings that couldn’t be shut off. Sound familiar?

I halfheartedly tried to talk the developer into building the Zune client with AIR so that they could have all this amazing functionality - plus cross OS support - but no luck.  Oh well, their loss. :-)

There was lots more about security, modules, framework caching, etc but that has been covered in lots of other places.

Is it late February yet? :-)