"Adobe is a natural building material composed of sand, sandy clay and straw or other organic materials, which is shaped into bricks using wooden frames and dried in the sun." Great, but what's the link with the Mac world? Oh...it was about Adobe Systems! Let's start again...

Adobe Systems is a notorious US computer software company founded in December 1982 by John Warlock and Charles Geschke, headquartered in San Jose, California. Since then, everything became history - PostScript, Photoshop or the relatively recent purchase of its competitor, Macromedia. Anyway, we're not going to talk about any of all these, because a recent move made Adobe enter the Software Development Industry, and this is my target.

The move that I told you about has a simple name, Flex, or - if you want the whole deal - it's "Adobe Flex Technologies". Last week, Adobe Systems announced that Adobe Flex Builder 2 was available for the Mac platform, and if you are wondering about the purpose of this software, then I can tell you that Flex Builder 2 is an extension of its toolset for designing and deploying a new class of rich Internet applications.

Initially released by Macromedia in March 2004, the technologies incorporated by Adobe Flex help developers and designers to build engaging web applications combining the benefits of the classic desktop software approach with the interactive features of the Web.

While the Adobe Flex 2 SDK, including the Flex framework and command line compiler, is available free of any charge for everybody, Adobe Flex Builder 2 has an estimated street price of 499$, and the "heavy weight version", Adobe Flex Builder 2 with Charting comes for a price of 749$.