The random utterances of David Arno

Last Friday, Adobe announced that Flex Builder 4 will actually be called Flash Builder. As many folk use Flex Builder to create non-Flex SWFs, it does make sense. Remember Flex is little more than just a bunch of ActionScript classes after all, so Adobe could well have been limiting sales of Flex Builder with its old name.

What seems odd though is that there seem to be no plans to rename the Flex SDK at the same time. The Flex SDK is equally inappropriately named as it contains all of the core Flash classes, the compiler, ASDoc generator etc, as well as the Flex classes. Also without a change to the Flash Pro designer tool, confusion will continue to reign as Adobe will have two products called Flash Pro and Flash Builder Pro respectively. Such a half-baked name change smacks of some poorly thought-out marketing decision at too low a level within the company.

Another oddity of the name change is with regard to trademarks. According to the Adobe website, the fully qualified name of Flex Builder is the ridiculously cumbersome Adobe^® Flex^® Builder™. Presumably Adobe will try to slap a trademark on Flash Builder too. I’m no lawyer, so may be wrong here, but I suspect that as existing products using the name Flash Builder have been around for years, the TM on Adobe’s Flash Builder will mean little more than “Totally Meaningless”. See a4desk.com and the flashbuilder tool on tucows for example. Third party software houses will presumably therefore be free to use the term in their products too. Given how anal Adobe normally are over trademarks, I’m surprised at the name choice therefore.