Adobe just announced their Flash Platform, which now includes both Flash Player and Adobe AIR, the tools for developing content for the players, the Flex framework (not the builder… that’s the tool), all sorts of servers to be used with Flash and third party stuff… From now on, this all this will be referred to as Flash Platform. Also, the diagram representing the entire Flash Platform shows the design tools (After Effects, Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop) that can communicate with he development tools of the platform, through the FXG format. The development tools of the platform are of course Adobe Flash and Flex Builder and a new tool for those who tend to be more design centric than code centric in their work – Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo).

Catalyst will be announced by Adobe at the Max conference (which is going on these days). Also, the newest version of AIR is out – AIR 1.5 – which has been much improved from the previous version (better performance, Flash Player 10 and Webkit support) – go on and download it, if you didn’t already. Gumbo (the new Flex Builder 4) will also be available for preview and presented at Max. It seems that the new Flex Builder will have lots of improvements that will be followed (hopefully) by a new lightweight and scalable framework.