Those of you who were at the Tuesday keynote or the sneaks last night saw a new Adobe product code named Pacifica. Pacifica is the high quality audio working over VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, think Vonage) Renaun Erickson has posted a survey for those interested in the private beta. So if you want to get your hands on the early bits, fill out the survey here.

The Linux penguin has shown himself all over MAX, especially at the event last night where there were stickers everywhere. There was a good reason for this excitement and that is that Adobe released the first alpha of FlexBuilder for Linux yesterday. This is a milestone and hopefully means that AIR for Linux is coming soon as well.

So if you are a Linux user, get the FB3 alpha here.

Thermo has certainly caused quite a buzz at MAX. Everywhere I go I hear people discussing this new tool. If it was Adobe’s goal to start a viral marketing campaign, they have certainly succeeded. I even heard that the Microsoft spies that are here at MAX had good things to say about it.

Hopefully, the fact that it is very early in development and still has a ways to go before the first release will not slow the momentum that Adobe has started. It is great to see so many people exited about this tool and Rich Internet Applications in general.

Those of you who were at the keynote this morning saw a very cool demo of the Thermo project which is a Rich Internet Application design tool. Basically, the demo took a layered image file and imported it, broke it up into individual asset images and wrote MXML code behind the scene. It also went a step further and allowed the designer to convert text field and scroll bar mock ups into Flex components, using the pieces as the new skin for the MXML component.

So the demo was very impressive and really made it simple for a designer or anyone who doesn’t generally code to create a RIA.

Here is why this scares me. While I was watching the demo, all I could think about was the tons or image assets that were being embedded which would bloat the SWF file pretty quickly. But more importantly as a developer who may be working with the designer, I would be scared at to the code that would be given to me to enhance with back end data, etc. I can only assume that this would be one giant MXML file and I would then be working hard to break out the code into an MVC architecture.

So, although I have only seen a brief demo of Thermo, I can only assume that this product will make a designers life easier but will probably cause me to make a large contribution to purchases of Pepto Bismol. Just my 2 cents.

In case you missed it, the AIR Derby winners have been announced. Congratulations to all!

Grand Prize Winner and Winner—Best Flex Business Application

Agile Agenda
Developer: Marc Hughes
Winner—Best HTML Business Application

ORA Time and Expense
Developer: John Wu
Winner—Best HTML Community Application

Spaz.AIR
Developer: Edward Finkler
Winner—Best Flex Community Application

SearchCoders
Developers: Tom Bray and Robert Cadena
Winner—Wild Card

Digimix
Developer: Alan Queen