Text Layout Framework and AIR in popsci.com

Ok.
This is pretty big by any standards. The Text Layout Framework Beta was released today on Labs. It's for Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. And the demos look pretty darn awesome. I thin we all have been dreaming of this level of control over the text display in our Flash based apps. And now with the Flash Player 10 's text features it looks like we're finally there.
Of corse you'll use it with CS4 or Flex. Good thing Flex is Open Source now ain't it?
Some features:

• Bidirectional text, vertical text and over 30 writing systems including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, the major writing systems of India, and others.
• Selection, editing and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, and around inline images
• Vertical text, Tate-Chu-Yoko (horizontal within vertical text) and justifier for East Asian typography
• Rich typographical controls, including kerning, ligatures, typographic case, digit case, digit width and discretionary hyphens
• Cut, copy, paste, undo and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing
• Rich developer APIs to manipulate text content, layout, markup and create custom text components.

Take it for a spin!
And ahm, AIR wins Popular Science's Best of What's New in 2008 at the Computing category. "The Web without a browser" they say. I say we play along on this one. Do it for the nice trophy ;)

Quake Arena requires Flash Player 10

Cocomo is

"a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA"

Alchemy is

"a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2)"

So you see, soon enough you'll be able to play Quake Arena online in your browser :)

[Update]
Load up your chain guns!
It's on /.
:D