Flex Builder gets new name

As expected Flex Builder has now been renamed to Flash Builder starting with version 4 due out later this year(?). Lee Brimlow broke the news and has answered a few questions people have regarding what this means for the future of the Flash IDE and how this may effect confusion between Flash & Flex.

Ultimately we need to remember that Flex is, and has always been, a framework. Flex Builder was named as such as it’s primary purpose is to build Flex projects though more and more people are now using it to build pure Actionscript projects. Personally I think the name change makes sense purely from a marketing point of view and it generally solidifies the Flash platform as a brand onto itself.

At the beginning of the year I had plans to learn the Flex framework though I have since decided to wait for version 4 to be released. My reasoning for this was I felt Flex 3 is still quite finicky when it comes to customizing the visual look of components. Flex 4 seems to be taking this issue as a primary design goal with a much improved separation between a component’s skin and logic. I’m still coding Flash using FlashDevelop for the time being but am very much looking forward to the release of Flex Buil… err… Flash Builder.