Yesterday Ted Patrick officially announced that the upcoming version of Flex Builder will renamed to Flash Builder via Twitter. The last months Adobe forced to speak about the Flash Platform, the new interaction design tool for Flex application was called Flash Catalyst and now the next foreseeable step comes: Flex Builder becomes Flash Builder.
I’m not really sure, what I should think about the hole renaming. From the stand point of Product Marketing, it’s clear. The end result of all IDEs is a SWF running in the Flash Player. In the entreprise world, Flash has no good reputation. This is cause the millions of bad animations and ad banner produced with Flash in the last years. I don’t think the renaming of the product makes it easier to convince decision maker to use Flex for their applications. If Flash hadn’t this negative connotation this renaming wouldn’t be as critical as it is. It looks like we must start talking about the Flex Framework instead of Flex.
More information about the renaming can found on the blogs of the Adobe evangelists: Duane Nickull, Lee Brimelow and Serge Jespers.
PS: Ted Patrick, who announced the renaming changed the name of his blog from “Ted on Flex” (onflex.org) to “Ted on Flash” (onflash.org) about 3 months ago.
PSS: SAP calls it Flex based solutions also Flash Islands and not Flex Islands.
