Imagine you’re traveling in the outback, driving your 4×4 up a dry riverbed, leaving behind a long trail of brown dust as you wend your way to the next meter point, where you measure the water table level and enter it into your Force.com application. Miles from nowhere, miles from any wifi or satellite connection, with nothing in the sky but circling scavenging birds, you interact with the cloud.

That’s the power of Adobe© Flash© Builder™ for Force.com—it lets you build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that combine the power of the Adobe Flash Platform and the Force.com cloud computing platform.

The toolset, developed jointly by Adobe and salesforce.com, has a number of cool features, for example:

• Online and offline data synchronization and management
• A local data store, letting you create apps that work even when they’re not connected
• When you do connect (hungry and parched), you can make use of the conflict resolution service to help sync the changes back to Force.com app.
• The IDE lets you compose the applications effortlessly too, and includes a gamut of user interface components for presenting, and visualizing your data – including charting and animation.

Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is currently in developer preview; so while it’s not suitable for production work, it’s just fine for you to start exploring.

Register to download the toolkit, and to attend the upcoming webinar that covers all the details of building RIAs for Force.com!

Here’s a vid that shows much of it in action: