Flex Services

Adobe's Flex development environment seems to be pretty powerful, and at the moment it's not at all oriented toward mobile development. However, the idea underlying most applications and services being created with Flex is in perfect harmony with mobile use.

Take Buzzword, for example. It's a "connected" word processor you use in a browser window. Its capabilities are right at the surface; unlike Microsoft Word and its ilk, Buzzword does not have dozens of menus with hundreds of options. This is a good high-level description of a good mobile application. Try an iPhone, for example, and you aren't faced with lots of menus, options, and a big control structure to navigate.

Flex tends to produce applications and services that don't yet work very well on mobile gadgets, though, because they require too much memory or rely on the very latest version of software (Flash, usually) that doesn't yet run on mobiles.

That's the sort of thing that always gets solved over time in tech industries, leaving only the question of when Adobe will start really pushing Flex into the mobile space, and how hard they're going to push it. They're already thinking about it.