Adobe will release Flex 3 around February of 2008. It has a number of improvements and new features, and in particular it’ll bring Flash designers and Flex developers together. Creative Suite 3 will have an easy way to incorporate Flex content right into the timeline of Flash IDE. Containers created in Flash will be able to have content developed in Flex. You’ll need to have a Flex component toolkit for Flash CS3. This should inspire Flash art crowd to learn at least a little bit of Flex basics, which will make them a lot more marketable for many years to come.

Earlier this year I saw a presentation of Silverstream from Microsoft. I was impressed by the ease of developing  fancy GUI applications by a Web designer who did not know programming. He’d just create fancy graphics (using the timeline) and effects adding the place holders for the code to be written by Sillverlight developers. Now Flash designers will also easily incorporate Flex code in their creations.

Just watch this five-minute youtube video  to see what I’m referring to. The new generation of User Experience professionals will get better tooling and motivation to acquire new skills. But introduction of programming to artists should be done gently – they are  different people, and you may scare them away by programmer’s lingo. I know this first hand, because my son, professionally trained cartoonist and animator with great command of Flash IDE rejects to have anything to do with programming. On several occasions I tried to convince him that making more money by learning some programming is good. So far I did not succeed in reaching this goal, but I’ll keep trying, especially when Flex 3 will be released. People who realize that knowing of Web design and programming is the future will have an edge.