In the past, I’ve been critical of how Adobe is handling Flex developers. Part of that is just because it’s a new product, but I always felt that part of it was because Adobe/Macromedia was used to dealing with designers. Sure there was always ColdFusion but those guys are just crazy .

But Ted Patrick released what is a pretty good Flex search engine today. It aggregates content from Flexcoders, the Developers Center, the Flex Documentation and Actionscript 3 Documentation. If you search for +Matt +Chotin you get about 43,323,231 entries (including some begging for help and ‘special thanks’). If you complain about the Flex interface, Ted impersonates Christopher Columbus in the comments.

In all seriousness, this is going to be a great tool. There are some great resources for Flex out there, but the problem is finding them. This is going to go a long way towards making that happen. And this is just the alpha version. I know there are a lot of plans in the pipeline and I feel very good about this being an anchor for the developer community. Giving people who are new to Flex the ability to find exactly what they are looking for very quickly will go a long way to increasing the population.

Then again, Flex developers are making bank because of the shortage, so this could be a bad thing. Just kidding.