For a free First Person Shooter, Americas Army is awesome. I have played the game since the first version and continued to play up to 2.4 or so. With version 2.x, the hackers seemed to be everywhere and we sort of lost interest in it.

Then the announcement for AA3 came out and it was using the new Unreal engine. The excitement was back!

June 17th, AA3 was released to the public.

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I downloaded the FB4 beta today, excited to see what new goodies I was going to be able to play with in the up coming months.

First the Good:
I like the data services and how you can connect to your services and get your database queries. Its pretty easy to put into a datagrid and create a view of your data.

Now the bad:
FB4 for me goes away from what I liked about Flex. I am not a designer. I don't work with designer (not out of choice, just most clients won't pay for pretty pictures when all they want is data). Flex allowed me to quickly, easily and without grief to create business applications that still looked decent.

Now comes Flash Builder 4. In their haste to seperate design from development they have made it so convulated that I can't even figure out how to put a friggin canvas on the page and change its background color. FB4 doesn't even have a CANVAS item to drop on the application. Now you got skinnablecontainers and groups and no explanation how these bloody things work. What if I just want to build something f'in QUICK AND SIMPLE! Add a little color, maybe round some corners.

Now this goes back to to 1 of my BIGGEST beefs with Adobe and Flex. I work for a living. I also like to enjoy some free time gaming or messing with my dog. Why is it that I have to spend 100s of dollars buying books, and spending hours looking for information just so I can use an Adobe product? With Flex 4 I feel like am back at the beginning lost with no information once again. Not 1 friggin sample from Adobe on just some f'in basics of FB4.

Its been a fustrating day. :)