Editor’s note: I posted this yesterday, but my categories were incorrect so it wasn’t picked up by MXNA. Sorry it’s late

I’m late with this because it’s been a hectic week here. Aside from the Flex 2 beta, there were a couple of other things that happened this week which should be mentioned. It’ll be a quick post.

On Monday, Jesse Warden gave his impression of Sparkle which is a must-read. I think he gave it the most in depth walkthrough, and discusses it without much bias.

On Tuesday, Engadget had a tutorial on how to run Flash games on your Xbox 360. Aside from the Flex 2 beta, this was the coolest news of the week. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the Flash Platform transcending barriers. What can’t you put Flash on.

Another major piece of news on Tuesday was the release of Flash Player penetration. Version 8 is already at 45.2% in the states and over 55% in Europe. Those numbers are awesome.

Last on Tuesday, Adobe had their Financial Analyst meeting which (despite the crazy wait in the middle) was worth a watch. It was mostly financial and vision talk, but they’re excited about the Flash platform, and they’re excited about the universal client as well.

Wednesday was the big bomb, the release of the Flex 2 beta and the news that they’ll be releasing parts of the Flex framework for free. It’s huge, huge news. I wish it had gotten more press, but keep spreading the word.

Then on Thursday Techcrunch posted some information about Gtalkr and the new features they rolled out. If you haven’t tried Gtalkr, you should head over and take a look. What they’re doing with Flash and how they’re integrating it to other Flash applications is cool. Their API is also very intriguing. Between Gtalkr and Goowy, Flash is showing that smaller companies can make a big splash.

Remember, if there’s anything I missed or anything you’d like to see next week, send me an e-mail. Have a good weekend and hopefully you’re rooting for the Seahawks on Sunday.

I had dinner and beers with Hans Omli up in Snoqualmie and had a great time (and Hans, I realized I owe you extra money for dinner). We talked a lot about Flex, Enterprise Services, ColdFusion, Seattle, and a bit about Apollo.

Hans is doing some awesome things with Flex, and I’m excited to be a part of the Flex/Flash community in Seattle. There?s a lot going on here and a lot of brainpower. If Adobe ever wanted to move the Flex team up here to Seattle, I’d be available to help pack the moving vans .

After talking to him about Apollo and how he sees the evolution of the Flash Platform, I’m excited about it and I can see why you hear whispers (and sometimes shouts) from Adobe about how great Apollo is. Before talking to Hans, I was skeptical and now I’m entirely sold.

The real power behind Flash is its ubiquity. You can take it almost anywhere, on any platform, and it will look basically the same. But it’s always been limited by not being able to take advantage of some of the extra power/features of the desktop. Jesse Warden talked about this in some comments earlier this week. What Apollo can do is provide the ability for Flash to take advantage of some of that power, which I kind of understood. But (and this is the revelation Hans gave me) not just on the desktop. Imagine being able to use Flash to take advantage of all the APIs and features of a pocket PC, a Mac, or a Media Center.

If Apollo can bridge Flash and the core strengths of the individual platforms, there’s a lot of potential. If you’ve looked at the LiveCycle documents you know the kind of things that PDF is capable of. If Apollo allows us to synchronize and take our data offline and then view it with any of our devices, there’s a lot of promise there.

I’m not sure if that’s the ultimate plan for Apollo, but I am beginning to see how my idea of Apollo fits very well within the Flash platform. Once I got over the mental hump of thinking about Apollo as a combination Flash Plugin-PDF Reader, the idea of Apollo became very exciting.

The guys over at Ajaxian linked to an interesting post by Kurt Cagle about AJAX in the context of the weather patterns of earth. It’s long, but it’s a fascinating read and all of the logic applies to Flex. In addition, there’s this quote which I liked:

I think that AJAX will eventually fall by the wayside, but it will be replaced by declarative databound objects, possibly along the lines of an XForms or related technology, however, this is simply a refinement of a larger scale movement away from client/server dyads and into multiply connected nexi that just happen to have the characteristics of being displayable (and manipulatable) by people. This will change the “energy” of the web as well.

I believe that while there are things AJAX is superior to Flex for (small forms and sites that require very quick initial load times, as examples) Flex ultimately solves the problems AJAX doe in a more sophisticated way.

AJAX is all the rage right now, but as Kurt notes, it can only take us so far. Flex will take us much further.