Just in time for the holidays, Adobe released new updates to AIR and Flex along with a first time release of a new technology called BlazeDS. Adobe AIR Beta 3 is the latest update to Adobe’s cross-platform runtime for deploying web-enabled desktop applications created using Flash, HTML, and Ajax. The latest update includes various features such as the functionality to run applications at start-up and the detection and launch of installed AIR applications from a web browser. The first application made by AIR Beta 3 is Adobe’s new desktop version of Kuler, Adobe’s color theme creation tool.

Adobe also released the new update to its open-source framework for creating rich internet applications, the new Beta 3 of Flex includes updates to the Flex SDK and the Flex Builder.

The last major release by Adobe this week is BlazeDS, a new technology for pushing information live from a server to Flex and AIR applications without the need for the client-side application to request a data update. This new technology is distributed under the LGPL vs3 making it available to developers free of charge. The source code of BlazeDS will be available for download early in 2008.

Adobe announced last week its intentions to make Flex Blender, the tool for creating rich internet applications using ActionScript 3.0, free to students and faculty staff of qualifying educational institutes. The open source version of Flex has been available for a while, and now the full fledged version will also be available for free to many. It is clear that Adobe is experimenting with different strategies to expand the usage of Flex and its AIR platform in order to compete with the several new technologies such as AJAX, Google Gears, and Silverlight for bridging the gap between desktop and web based applications.

This free version of Flex to be released next month will probably be available only for students in North America and Europe.

Three years has passed since the last update of GIMP, the open source image editing and image authoring program for the Linux, Windows, and Mac OSes. Highlights of the new update include scalable filters, redesigned selection tools, new align tool, newly organised menus, and additional supported format.

GIMP is totally free, so there is no excuse not to give it a try. The UI is different from that of Adobe’s Photoshop, so it might take you a while to get used to it.

Please be aware that running GIMP requires the GTK + 2 Runtime which you can download from here.

You can learn more about GIMP and download it for free from the GIMP homepage.

[via Download Squad]

Adobe showed a sneak preview at the Photoshop World conference of the upcoming Photoshop Express, it’s free web-base image editing tool. Photoshop Express is not expected to replace any of the existing Photoshop products, but is directed at Internet users wishing to edit images on the fly from within their browsers. There are many existing products that do this already such as Picnik (my personal favourite) which could be seriously threatened by Adobe’s upcoming product.

Check out the screenshot and learn more about this on John Nack’s blog.

[via TechCrunch]

Luxology, the maker of the 3D modeling and rendering tool modo, recently launched a new video portal on its official website for the distribution of free and commercial high resolution training videos. Videos are sorted by date, category, and popularity and are available for streaming and download. This move is made in hope to increase the amount of learning material available on the Internet for modo. A great number of video tutorials were made by beta-testers of modo, but regular users and website visitors will not be able to share their own training videos on Luxology.tv though, which I think is a wasted resource that Luxology should have considered.

You can now try downloading the Windows or Mac trial version of modo and check out some of their video tutorials to see if it works for you. The new video portal could be found at Luxology.tv.

The Blender Foundation announced a new project to create another open source movie codenamed Peach that will be created using Blender3D, the open source 3d modeling and rendering tool. The project is expected to be completed within six months starting October 2007. The open source movie Peach will be available for downloading for free upon its completion. The announcement could be found on Blender’s website here. If you have not seen the world’s firs open source movie, Elephant’s Dream, you can still view it here.

Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software that you are using. And it takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairement – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience. Download Color Oracle 1.1 beta for Windows. Click here to read more.

[via DownloadSquad]

DAZ Productions has announced the free release of Bryce 5.5 as a fully functional free download with no expiry period. Bryce is a 3d landscape rendering and modeling tool for the Mac and Windows platforms. The latest edition of Bryce, 6.1, could be purchased from DAZ Productions for the discounted price of $50 until the end of June 2007. Download the free version of Bryce from this link.

[via Download Squad]

Maya Personal Learning Edition (PLE) is a special version of Autodesk Maya software, which provides free access to Maya for non-commercial use. The PLE version is practically based on Maya 8.5, therefor it has most of the complete version’s features including, modeling (NURBS, polygons, subdivision surfaces), Character rigging and animation technology including full body Inverse Kinematics (IK) , Advanced Autodesk Maya Trax non-linear animation editor, and many more. You can get you fee copy of the new Maya PLE version over here. You can read more over here.

Adobe announced yesterday its plans to release a web based version of Photoshop within six months. As a web application, users will be able Photoshop to edit their images in a web browser over the internet without the need to install any applications on the computer itself. The web based of Photoshop is expected to be a lite version of Photoshop that has very basic functions, The application is targeted to the consumer market and should be free to use, just like Adobe’s online color palette tool, Kuler, and its upcoming online video editing tool, Adobe Remix. Learn more about the online edition of Photoshop from CNET’s News.com article.

[via Download Squad]