Why does Adobe limit their Flex 2 IDE trial to 30 contiguous days? I'm a huge fan of Flex but getting to grips with any new technology is a huge investment.

The biggest part of that investment by far is the time required to learn the technology. It takes days and weeks before you become truly useful in a new architecture. With good web developers charging out at ~£400/day that's a lot of investment. Add the cost of books and, in this case the IDE on top of that and you're looking at a hard cash investment of £470 over and above the time.

I think Adobe's done an awesome thing with Flex and I think that it's ultimately going to have a bigger effect than AJAX on our notions of how we interact with the web. That process is going to happen a whole lot faster when Adobe change their trial period from 30 contiguous days to 30 cumulative hours or similar and let people appreciate the benefits before they're locked out.

I chatted with Simon Willison about this and he mentioned that he'd played with it but the thing shut down before he had a chance to get to grips with it. Bit of a false economy for Adobe there. Simon speaks at a lot of conferences and is read by a lot of people but he's not going to be saying anything about Flex in the near future because it didn't happen to hook him in the two days he had spare to play with it.

Not so with me though - JavaScript is way too much work and Flex was love at first sight. Time to cough up some cash!