After a lot of hard work and long hours, Flex Builder 2 Beta 3 is finally ready for public consumption with the rest of the Flex 2 product line. Beta 3 contains the results of our UI scrub, and you’ll notice we have new icons, an improved Help look and feel, a more user-friendly (and very pretty) graphical property view and many other subtle changes to the product. Besides UI changes, we also fixed a number of bugs, cut down the memory profile and generally sped up the product.

For the editors, we added a few more features and enhancements to really make the editing experience awesome. The logic for import management and insertion was changed slightly to allow auto-import magic when typing through code hint proposals. This is in addition to the existing behavior of auto-importing when choosing a proposal.

We also added auto-completion of closing curly braces to the list of editor tricks: when you begin a block and type { and hit return, we will automatically insert a closing } in the correct location and put your cursor inside the newly created block. We don’t insert curly braces if one exists already, and yes, there is a preference to turn this off if you don’t like your editor too smart.

There’s more in this beta than I can begin to talk about so I’ll let the other bloggers at Adobe and the beta 3 release provide even more information.

As a side note, I was able to add some really great hooks for extensibility into this release, and I’ll be releasing a side project of mine (totally experimental) that takes advantage of these hooks and the great language intelligence architecture that Flex Builder 2 is built on. Look for it later this evening or early tomorrow. I’m pretty excited about it, and I’m sure everyone else will be as well. Until then, enjoy beta 3!