I know that it really sucks when contests must exclude certain regions of the world. I can’t tell you exactly why but, having set up contests at a variety of companies before, it always has something to do with legal issues. There are a variety of legal issues (which I don’t understand) that severely limit what we can do with contests.

As far as the Mac comment, I certainly don’t agree that, “Apparently there is no love for the Mac user anymore at Adobe.” Quite the opposite is true. The availability of Adobe software on different platforms is entirely dependent on development schedules and business opportunities. In the case of Adobe Lightroom (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/) it made more sense to make the Mac version available before the Win version. In the case of Flex Builder 2, it made more sense to release the Win version first. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be a Mac version. And as Robin pointed out, the Flex SDK is available for the Mac (and Linux), jut not Flex Builder 2 (yet).

I guess an alternative to releasing one platform on Labs before another is finished would be to hold everything back until everything is done - but then we’d have to wait months in order to get it into your hands. With projects like Labs we’ve instead decided to release software builds as quickly as possible, whether other platforms are ready to go or not.

Thanks,
MD

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2005/12/easily_compile.html

There are plenty of people working with AS3 and Flex 2 on OS X - yes you can’t run the FB2 plugin on OS X yet, but it’s still in beta and there are (I understand) some genuine technical issues. The important thing is that the compiler is a jar and runs fine on a Mac.