It's a good day for Flex news. Hot off the heals of the Hero announcement is the announcement that Adobe has released the Flex 4.1 SDK and an update to Flash Builder 4.

Flex 4.1 contains some small feature enhancements and a lot of major bug fixes. The biggest new feature is support for layout mirroring which is important for supporting right-to-left locales. Some of the bug fixes include major performance improvements and updates to the way Flex interacts with the Text Layout Framework. I'm particularly pleased with this aspect, as some bugs in the 4.0 SDK were causing me major headaches on recent project work.

The Flash Builder update appears to contain mostly small features and its own list of bug fixes. If you already have Flash Builder 4 the Adobe Updater (once the bane of our existence, now quite nice in CS5) should take care of the update for you. If it doesn't you can do the manual update from here or download a new copy of Flash Builder 4 from the product page.

Both updates also include support for the newly released Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 runtimes, recently released.

This update is significant in that it's Adobe's first big official update since Flex 4 was released earlier this year. While Spark has been nice to work with, the community has provided a lot of feedback and the team appears to have been hard at work making bug fixes to the framework. Native support for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 means we can all start looking at how Flash will work on Mobile, though we should all expect a better taste of that later this year when the beta for Hero is open.

Read more from RJ Owen.