In my quest to have high-quality content in my news reader, I’ve found ten must-have blogs. I tried subscribing to a Technorati search for Apollo/Flex, but it generates 100s of articles to read, mostly of low-quality news re-postings. It has taken me awhile to soak up the full Flex development community, so I hope these offerings will help you in finding some great resources. Most of the resources are duplicated in the main aggregators, but I wanted to point them out so when they post the occasional post, you don’t miss out! The numbering is purely for organizational and not meant to be a rating. Also, I’m not including the obvious resources here, like onFLex.org or Adobe’s own websites.

Download the OPML file to import the following Blogs into your favorite blog reader. (The links from this page are to the actual websites, not the feeds.)

1) Ted Patrik’s is an FLEX/MAX Evangalest for Adobe. Read his blog to keep up on interesting developments on the Flex product line and for handy code snippets and other useful ideas.

2) Quietly Scheming by Ely Greenfield, a developer for Adobe for over 10 years. He works on the Flex SDK. His site has components and code samples, and is a must read for anyone wanting to learn more about the nuances of Flex. Solid, coherent writer. Check out the section titled “Components” at the bottom of the blog for useful items, like the Landscape Zoomer.

3) Mike Chambers, Senior Product Manager for Developer Relations for AIR. The guy works at Adobe, writes book, and has useful knowledge that you need.

4) Sean Moore, the flash guy. Lots of great stuff, frequently updated. Great SQLLite tutorial for AIR.

5) Rico on Flex, Tips, Tutorials, News. I found some useful code snippets at the site, like creating BitMaps from Objects like Canvases. Not many people read his blog, according to Feedburner numbers, and he hasn’t been blogging very long, but I find his content of a high quality and look forward to reading his posts in the future.

6) Doug McCune, a wild-man doing some interesting UI work with the ActionScript Physics Engine. He discovered the ImageSnapShot class in the Flex 3, beta framework that I found useful.

7) Tater Salad. Casey writes about both Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight. Useful tidbits, no matter what technology you’re implementing with. I found the article on BitMap transformations very useful and educational, in which he takes an image, converts it to B & W. I did something similar, except I went though each pixel and averaged out the RGB values for B&W conversion. It’s nice to learn about Flex’s transformation and ColorMatrixFilter classes.

8) Horse and Buggy by Brad Umbaugh. He’s just starting out, but I think I’ll enjoy his writing about mixing Flex up with Ruby on Rails (for those of you who want to use a different backend on your applications).

9) ActionScript CheatSheet Blog. Download nice PDF files of the AIR and ActionScript Class Libraries.

9a) Ryan Stewart - Rich Internet Application Mountaineer. I originally forgot about Ryan, how could I? He likes mountain climbing, I like mountain climbing. Not to mention he’s the Rich Internet Application evangelist for Adobe.

10) Adobe’s Smart Category blog indexes on Flex and AIR. The following contain a lot of noise as there aggregations of some 1300+ blogs, but there’s some useful tidbits in there for the obscure blogger who writes something interesting. I wish there was a way to filter on posts that have reached a certain average rating. There’s also a lot of other Adobe Smart Categories that you can read.
Flex Smart Category
Air Smart Category

Other solid blogs thrown in for good measure because I discovered something useful at them:
11) Maikel Sibbald, Labs@Flex Coders, The Netherlands
12) Zeus Labs
13)
Ben Stücki
14) Alex Uhlmann

If you know of some excellent blogs out there on Flex/AIR, feel free to leave them in the comments, and I’ll update my reader, as I’m always looking for fresh voices and opinions to read.