The Adobe evangelists are spreading out across the United States, Europe, and even Australia this month to talk to Adobe user groups about the new features in Flex 3 and Adobe AIR. If you’re interested in hearing about how Flex and AIR can help you or even just what all of the buzz is about, this is a great, informal way to do it. Here’s the full list of cities and dates:

Updated: Now with Australia/New Zealand dates

Joe Johnston has updated his working AIR iPhone application to run on Adobe AIR beta 3. He’s still using Ribbit so you can actually use the iPhone to make calls. It’s a great example of custom chrome and how a pretty simple desktop application can help convey a lot of concepts. He’s also got a lot of other AIR applications that he’s updated. It’s well worth checking out so if you don’t have it, grab Adobe AIR Beta 3 and get the .air file!

24 ways has a tutorial for getting started on your first Ajax AIR application by Jonathan Snook. It’s titled Christmas Is In the AIR and will give you everything you need to know to start building HTML/Ajax applications on the AIR runtime. It walks you through setting up the application descriptor file and also using the new HTML security model. It’s a very, very good tutorial and I hope it gets you excited about checking AIR out over the Christmas break.

Kevin Hoyt, the Ajax master on the AIR team has updated all of his Ajax samples to run on AIR Beta 3. We made a lot of changes with AIR beta 2 around Ajax and security but for the most part Beta 3 was just bug fixes with the exception of drag and drop. So if you’re just starting out on AIR or there’s something you want to see how to do on the Ajax side, subscribe to Kevin’s blog and check out the samples.

Ooyala, a company that is making a lot of use of AIR, won the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge last week. I wrote about Ooyala’s use of Adobe AIR in their Backlot application over on the Universal Desktop. Even though AIR is a desktop runtime, the web is the most important component of any rich Internet application including those on the desktop. AIR and Amazon Web Services make for a great combination and Ooyala is a perfect example of that.

[Via Andre Charland]

Mike Chambers just unveiled the new logo for Adobe AIR. This is the final logo and we tried to incorporate a lot of what AIR is into it. As Mike says:

Adobe AIR is built on top of three core web technologies (HTML, Flash and PDF), and we wanted the logo to represent this. Thus, each corner of the logo represents one of these core technologies.

Enjoy the new logo:

Doug Sharp emailed me to tell me about a game he’s building called ChipWits II. He actually wrote ChipWits I on a Mac back in 1984 and thought AIR was a good excuse to do another version. In the game you program a robot using icons and breakpoints. The graphical programming language teaches the basics of development in a fun and engaging way. If you have kids, I’d encourage you to download this and let them check it out.

Doug entered ChipWits II in the Independent Games Festival this year. I think he has a winner.

Eric Natzke is one of the leading interactive artist of our day so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that he’s using AIR to help him make his creative visions come to life. Eric’s been working on a project with AIR and CS3 in which he takes photographs and creates very cool surreal artwork based on them. Using the colors from the image and a series of concentric circles, he creates a very cool looking version of the original photograph.

He describes his process a bit in the comments of this Flickr photo but he essentially manipulates the photo in Flash CS3. He then uses AIR to export those as PNGs. Because it’s all dynamic and he’s making sure he has super-high res (400 megs) AIR lets him get all of his artwork out of Flash. He then combines them using Photoshop. Very, very cool use of CS3 and AIR together. I want him to do some of my photos.

Mozilla announced Prism on their labs site today, a re-branded version of WebRunner that helps take your browser applications to the desktop. It has some important differences from Adobe AIR but there are also a lot of interesting similarities that prove people are interested in bringing the web to the desktop.

The differences mostly lie in the way the two runtimes come at the same problem. Prism is basically taking existing web applications and giving them a desktop feel with things like their own window, a place on the system tray/start menu, and a pretty easy way to turn any web site into a desktop application. AIR on the other hand is more desktop centric. In addition to all the branding aspects of having an app on the desktop you also get some important functionality such as access to the file system, the ability to associate files with your AIR application and a standard install/uninstall process.

What’s cool is that both Adobe AIR and Prism will let you take your existing application and port it to the desktop with little or no code changes. They also both use HTML and JavaScript. Prism obviously uses Firefox’s HTML rendering engine, while Adobe AIR uses WebKit. So with both runtimes you can take any Ajax application out there today and turn it into a desktop application. Depending on the feature set and experience you’re looking for you can choose what delivery mechanism is best for you.

Along with the recent Flex Builder 3 public beta 2 release Adobe recently announcing the new packaging and pricing for Flex Builder 3.

Adobe Flex™ Builder™ 3 Standard Edition – $249
Adobe Flex™ Builder™ 3 Professional Edition $699

Flex Builder 3 Professional Edition adds the following feature:

• Data visualization and charting components
• Memory and performance profilers
• Flex test automation framework

Upgrade Pricing:

• Flex Builder 2 to Flex Builder 3 Standard Upgrade – $99 US
• Flex Builder 2 with Charting to Flex Builder 3 Professional Upgrade – $299 US
• Trade-up from FB Standard to FB Professional – $499 US

New Flex Builder 2 Pricing

Starting on November 1, 2007, Adobe will be re-pricing Flex Builder 2 to align with the new Flex Builder 3 pricing, so you will be able to purchase Flex Builder 2 for only $249 US and Flex Builder 2 with Charting for only $699 US.