There's a three very big announcements from Adobe today that have really moved the needle forward for RIA developers.

First, a new version of Flex has been released, Flex 3. You can find Flex Builder 3 and the Flex 3 SDK online for donwload. Remember that Flex 3 is open source, under the MPL license, and with that comes some new sites to help manage the open source project. There's a open bug database online, and a Wiki with project details.

Secondly, Adobe has renamed Apollo to Adobe Integrated Runtime (Adobe AIR). There's a new release for this as well that adds in HTML / Ajax support, along with PDF (using Adobe Reader 8.1), a native local database called SQLite, and many more improvements.

Finally, Adobe has released a preview version of the next version of Flash Player, which includes a number of improvements, most which I don't understand. Check out this labs page for details on them.

There's a ton of coverage in the blogosphere about these announcements, especially about the renaming of Adobe AIR. Jay Fortner covers it at ReadWriteWeb, Ryan Stewart has a lot of great information, and Ted Patrick has some great insight and a ton of posts on his blog.

What's an Apollo application worth? Well, right now its worth at least $154.85. That's the current bid price to be the first one to get the eBay San Dimas Apollo application. San Dimas' project leader, Alan Lewis, has put up the first version of the upcoming beta to eBay in a charity auction. Head over to the eBay auction now to bid. At the very least you can get a few laughs from the item description.

In an email sent to testers, Alan indicated that the project is now feature complete, and they are working on fixing some bugs. They will start sending out invitations to San Dimas "very soon". The auction itself ends on the 4th of June, so don't expect anything before then.

TechCrunch had a story the other day about a new start up called CoRank that allows you to setup your own Digg like website for any specific topic. I have set one up for rich Internet applications, and its online at ria.corank.com. The site allows anyone to submit stories that are then voted on and promoted to the front page. There are bookmarklets available for every major browser that allow you to easily add a story to the site, as well as links for blogs and websites.

Check it out and participate if you'd like to help highlight the great stories and examples of rich Internet applications that are out there.

Dryerfox - a rotating browser window wrapped by a dryer image. Why? Because you can. (via)

The team over at SearchCoders has created an Apollo application that allows Flex developers to search a number of Flex resources, including the Flex Coders email list. They've got a small online demo where you can see the application, and then download the .air file directly. The SearchCoders application allows you to build complex search queries to the FlexCoders email list, allowing you to easily monitor and watch threads that you're interested in.

The Apollo application adds a note taking pod that allows you save short notes. This is particularly useful if you come across something in the mail messages that interests you, though I do wish you were able to copy and paste text from the emails directly. Hopefully that will come in a future version.

If you haven't checked out SearchCoders, you should. Its a highly useful tool for Flex developers.

Scrapblog was featured on TechCrunch yesterday. They went offline for a while, but are back. The application is Flex based, and allows anyone to create really cool scrapbooks with their existing photos.

As with all web based applications, users must upload photos to the server, and then have those photos downloaded to the application. Apollo would allow users to access their local photos directly, which would be a huge boost to the application, especially as photo sizes become larger. And that's just what they did: they ported their existing Flex application to an Apollo application.

Ryan Stewart has some more information on this Apollo application, with a reference to Tara Hunt's blog, where she discusses how easily and quickly they were able to do it.

You can stay up to date with Scrapblog via their developer blog.

Photo Mosaic is a pretty cool Apollo application that will create a photo mosaic based on your photos and a Flickr search. You start off by entering a keyword to search Flickr for. The default is summer, but you can make it whatever you want. Then, you select a photo from your computer. The application then maps the colours of your photo, and follows that up by inserting the Flickr photos that most closely map the colours in the photo and creates the mosaic. You can then save the mosaic to your photo library.

I've been informed that YourMinis will be launching their Apollo based desktop widget platform very shortly. I've been using it for a while now, and its pretty cool. The widgets from YourMinis show up on my desktop, either Windows or Mac, without any problems. The same code as I'm using for my web based widgets too, which is great.

When you have the Apollo version of YourMinis installed, you can see another button on the YourMinis website (very cool - it actually appears in the widget after you launch the Apollo mini manager if you didn't have mini manager running, nice!) that says "copy to desktop". Doing that adds the widget to your desktop based widgets, with the same controls as you have on the web versions (ie. copy to web is still enabled on the desktop widgets.)

There are still a few bugs in this version - I had it crash on me once, but I like the idea of using the same widgets for both my desktop and the web. I think this has some potential.

I went to listen to Steve Rubel talk today at the AjaxWorld Expo in New York... He loves widgets: hopefully he'll check out yourMinis soon.

The latest version of the Edge newsletter has an article written by Anthony Franco who discusses the development of the Apollo eBay Desktop.

leslie over at jin'sync has created an Apollo wrapper for GMail. This allows you to access GMail as a desktop application: it doesn't take advantage of any of the other APIs that Apollo enables.

When we showed Apollo at the Engage Conference, there was some concern that Apollo would become a "super bookmark" platform. Hopefully this app can be used as a compelling proof of concept to the GMail team, rather than showing how easy it is to build an Apollo application that essentially acts as a desktop bookmark (deskmark?) to GMail.