Big day: Astro beta, compiler and Google Maps API

Big day in the world of Flex beginning with the beta version of next the Flash Player (codenamed Astro) finding itself on the labs site. We've heard about it since Max 2007 and now we can see it in action. My two new favorites features are the advanced text rendering and the utilization of the GPU for faster graphics performance because of the fact that we mainly build business applications at my company. The other new features are mainly drawing related, so mainly for those working in Flash authoring itself. You can already start building Flex applications and run them against the new player by downloading the required playerglobal.swc library from here.
And last but not least, Google has released the Google Maps API for Flash, so now you can the Google Maps component to any Flex or Flash based application. I've already used the same component but from Yahoo and using that one was easy, so I expect the same from the Google one.