Adobe is also releasing an updated alpha version of the Flex Builder 3 for Linux to include support for AIR applications.

In addition to AIR and Flex releases for Linux, Adobe announced that it had joined the Linux Foundation in an effort to help "accelerate the growth of RIA technologies on the Linux platform."

AIR for Linux has been promised by Adobe "in upcoming releases" for a few months, and though Linux support won't provide AIR with a huge bump in users, it does help Adobe to demonstrate their commitment to the open source community. Google's Gears is probably the chief competitor to AIR -- though it's not a one-to-one comparison since Gears apps still live in the browser -- and already supports Firefox on Linux.

With InMarket, developers can submit their applications in order to reach the millions of customers who use app stores to find and download new applications for their devices.

For application end users, there's no change. Users will continue to use the front-end app store they're familiar with but some of the apps they download will be handled through the Adobe service, unbeknownst to them.

The first app store InMarket supports is Intel's "AppUp," an app store that supported on platforms using Intel's Atom processors, aka the "netbook app store."

More stores will be announced during the MAX conference this week and Adobe expects to support ten stores by the second half of 2011, including stores for desktop, mobile, tablet and TV.

"Open@Adobe is a site aggregating Adobe's openness programs, which includes source code hosting, such as the Adobe® Flex framework, and contributions from Adobe to standards organizations, as well as specifications."

The Geeknet-run web-based source code repository acts as a central location where developers can manage and maintain open source software.

"SourceForge," McAllister continued. "gave us the ability to support all of the things we needed and the flexibility to replace things we wanted to. SourceForge and the new development forge gives us the ability to connect our developer community to a global community."

The Open Source Forge is a new platform at SourceForge. The "first instantiation" of the new platform, according to Geeknet's Jeff Bates, VP of Products, is Open@Adobe.

"By utilizing SourceForge, Adobe benefits from SourceForge's new forge platform and large global community, while saving time and resources required to maintain a large repository of code and documentation."

The repository currently holds 267,000 open source projects and facilitates just under three million downloads per day.

Avail yourselves of more ReadWriteWeb coverage of Adobe and open-source issues.

As of this posting, if you head to the FreshAirapps site you'll see a note from James Whittaker noting that Whittaker's usage of the word "AIR" in his domain name poses a problem with Adobe. No matter how obscure this may seem, rules are rules and Adobe explicitly states the following in its list of trademarks:

"Adobe® AIR™" is a trademark of Adobe that may not be used by others except under a written license from Adobe. You may not incorporate the Adobe AIR trademark, or any other Adobe trademark, in whole or in part, in the title of your Developer Application or in your company name, domain name or the name of a service related to Adobe AIR."

Is Adobe Just Being a Bully?

Is Adobe jealous of the publicity and potential that FreshAIRapps has compared to its own directory for AIR apps? It shouldn't be. If you were to do a search on Google for "adobe AIR apps", FreshAIRapps isn't even on the first page. On the other hand, there are several reasons why I'd visit FreshAIRapps over Adobe's AIR showcase. For one, I like FreshAIRapps site design better. It's cleaner and more refreshing for me. Two, there are reviews from both a technical and user perspective about each app. This keeps me from having to download apps just to find out whether or not they'd be worth my time.

Whittaker ends the note with his reasons for starting FreshAIRapps in the first place, while expressing his disappointment in Adobe:

I have been in communication with members of the Adobe evangelist team who truly believe that I am helping the community and promoting the use of the AIR runtime and subsequent applications built on the platform. I started this site because I have a genuine interest in AIR and other Adobe technologies.

I feel that Adobe has let me and the community down by trying to block sites that appear to challenge their marketplace, even though none of the apps featured on this site are hosted by me.

Is Adobe in the Wrong?

In the end, FreshAIRapps is free publicity for Adobe and they're going after the wrong guy. This isn't the first incident where big companies hit the supporters of their products with take-down notices or anything similar. In this case, FreshAIRapps doesn't even host the applications. Whittaker simply reviewed and promoted the apps, something numerous sites already do. Yet, Adobe blames the problem on the "AIR" trademark that's registered in the domain name. This all seems ridiculous at the end of the day. With a new domain name and a sour after-taste, is Adobe in the wrong here?

According to the statement, the partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, Adobe's industry-wide initiative set to address challenges of Web browsing on a broad range of screens.

ARM believes that the resulting technology will run on "billions of devices from our partners, such as pocket-sized mobile devices, mobile computing platforms, set-top boxes, digital TVs and automotive infotainment," said vice president of marketing, Ian Drew in the statement. "The combination of Adobe Flash and ARM's low-power processor IP and Mali GPU will ensure a fantastic Internet experience for consumers on the world's leading 32-bit architecture."

Getting Flash on mobiles in an efficient manner has been a goal of Adobe for some time. The majority of mobile phones that can use Flash at the moment use Flash Lite, the cut down version of the technology, and one that is limited in what it can play.

Although the technology is not expected to be available until the second half of 2009, Adobe will demonstrate Flash Player 10 during the Adobe MAX developer conference this week in San Francisco.

The app lets you turn common document files like Microsoft Office, Open Office, Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and a variety of images into Adobe's propriety PDF format. The company promises document quality comparable to that produced by Acrobat for dekstops.

We can see this feature being useful in a number of professional scenarios. Anytime a report, contract or other work-related document needs to be transmitted as a PDF, this app can do it without the need to be in front of a desktop computer. Anybody doing more sophisticated layout and page design work, however, is still chained to a desktop for that workflow, so they'll have little reason to use mobile PDF creation tools like this.

CreatePDF is available for $9.99 in the App Store.

The API is likely to lead to some really fun capabilities. Imagine all the accessibility and beauty of Adobe AIR, combined with the real-world location and frictionless data transfer capabilities of NFC. Hot.

Android devices have NFC APIs, but presumably such capabilities baked into AIR would enable a new level of ease and power for developers seeking to build apps that let users swipe their phones over tags to register their locations, perform transactions and take other actions still yet to be determined.

The other side of the story is that NFC may never catch on widely and Adobe AIR is not loved by all, either. Nothing is perfect though and this might be pretty good.

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is talking to Tim O'Reilly on stage now. Bruce says that before the Macromedia acquisition, Adobe was a peripheral player on the Web - so the acquisition brought them back into the heart and soul of the Web. He talks about the importance of Flash on mobile (Flash lite), which is key going forward. 

Tim asked him about Ajax and how it is taking over the use of Flash in some things. Bruce replied that they don't view Ajax as a competitor to Flash. He also says they've believed in open standards from day 1.

On the challenge from Microsoft, Bruce said he's pleased Google is "a heat shield". He says "the good news is that Microsoft has lots of enemies". He notes that Microsoft has been competing with Adobe almost as long as they've been in business - e.g. Microsoft's PhotoDrop product in the mid-90's. He says Adobe will focus on what they're really good at - "making things local".

Tim mentions the electronic reading apps that both Microsoft (via NYTimes) and Adobe have come out with recently. Bruce says the NYTimes Reader is similar to what Adobe has been trying to do with PDF. Adobe are extending that themselves with their Digital Reader. He says over the last 7 years they've been talking about ebooks, but he thinks "we're almost there" in regards to ebook devices - he points to Sony Reader as an example.

Finally he talks a little about Apollo, which renders Flex and HTML etc both within and outside the browser - "think iTunes on steriods". Tim asks whether that makes Adobe the "dark horse" of Internet platform players, a question which is left hanging....

This new organization within Adobe will bring together the e-book business groups that worked on the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, as well as the group that worked with the New York Times on the Times Reader 2.0. The new group will focus on developing products and business opportunities for digital publishers. These will include support for business models like subscription, advertising and retail.

Sony, for example, currently uses Adobe's Content Server to power its DRM solution for e-books. While Sony offers its e-books in the ePub format, it also uses Adobe's Content Server to wrap a proprietary DRM solution around the open ePub format.

Bill McCoy is Leaving Adobe

Bill McCoy drove Adobe's push towards making ePub the default format for eBooks. McCoy, however, is leaving Adobe as part of the restructuring. We can only hope that the company will continue to push for open standards in McCoy's absence. More details about McCoy's role at Adobe can be found at TeleRead.

The service is simple to use and offers some nifty features, including a gorgeous online file viewer. To share a document users simply upload or choose from their library, enter email addresses of those they want to share the document with, make any notes, set file permissions (i.e., do you want users to be able to download a document or just view it?) and then share. Before documents are shared, the Share service performs a virus scan and creates a thumbnail in the background.

When a user receives a shared file, he or she will be directed to an online page where the document will be presented in a awesome Flash-based file viewer. The viewer allows users to zoom in on the document and pan around it. It generally preserves the quality of the document as you zoom in and out. Users are then directed to log in or create an account if they want to download the document.

In a move that may signal an eventual intention to compete with online document repositories like Scribd, Adobe Share documents can be embedded on blogs via a Flash widget. The widget is resizable, meaning that it can fit into any web page design. Adobe Share also has a full set of REST APIs that allow outside developers to create applications and services that piggy back on the site. I was shown a demo of an AIR app that allowed users to access their Share files outside of the web browser.

Adobe is targeting small businesses and students with this product, and will release paid upgrades for it in time. The 1GB free version is full featured, however. A preview of Adobe Share will be available today on the Adobe Labs site.

Note: Josh Catone is at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, September 30 - October 3, courtesy of Adobe.

The Open Screen Project "will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices, and set top boxes," said Adobe in a press release.

In addition to publishing the Flash file format specifications, Adobe will also publish specs for the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the Action Message Format protocol. They will also publish the device porting layer APIs for the Flash player.

What Adobe is doing with Flash -- making it an open format -- follows in the footsteps of what they did with PDF back in the mid-90s. Adobe saw a lot of innovation happen around PDF after publishing the file spec and is hoping the same thing will happen with Flash. "Only by making the [Flash file format] spec open and available to everyone will we see the universe of the extended web grow," said Dave McAllister, Director of Standards and Open Source at Adobe, who told me that proprietary communications formats "make no sense."

Since releasing the PDF file format in 1993, it has become an open standard for documents and recently took a major step toward becoming the ISO 32000 Standard. Facing increasing pressure from Microsoft's competing Silverlight technology, it seems Adobe is gunning for Flash to become the standard format for delivering rich media to the web and other devices.

AIR Marketplace for Consumers

The two stores served different purposes for Adobe. The AIR Marketplace was a consumer-facing effort where end users could search for and discover applications built using Adobe AIR technology, like TweetDeck, AccuWeather's alerts app, AOL's Top 100 Videos or a Facebook Photo Uploader, to name a few of the more popular items. Developers were encouraged to list their apps in this store for self-promotional purposes, and it included typical consumer app store features like images, descriptions, ratings, reviews and social sharing options.

InMarket for Developers

Meanwhile, Adobe's InMarket was an app distribution service targeted towards developers. The idea here was that developers could publish once to distribute everywhere.

Adobe launched the store last fall, when it only supported publication to Intel's AppUp center, a Windows app store designed for netbooks and notebooks. At the time, Adobe said that it expected to support 10 stores by the second half of 2011. Unfortunately, that did not happen. According to the InMarket FAQ, only AppUp and Adobe's own AIR Marketplace were supported. This makes it seem as if the store's shutdown had less to do with "developer feedback" and more to do with Adobe's failure to secure app store partners as promised.

Developers have until August 31st to download their app analytics, revenue reports and other data, and update any widgets or links to their app's webpage. Developers who published to AppUp will receive an email from Intel over the next few days with more details about direct publishing.

With so many to discover, here's a look at why you might want to recommend your favorite Adobe AIR apps at FreshAIRApps.

FreshAIRApps Features

Adobe AIR Showcase
FreshAIRApps provides a great showcase for some of the hottest AIR apps available. Given a brief review, users are welcome to provide their own opinions in the comments section and rate each app on a scale of 1-5. So far only a handful of of AIR apps have been submitted. However, site visitors can easily submit an AIR app for reviewing via the "Suggest an AIR app" button located conveniently on the site's navigation menu.

Adobe AIR News
FreshAIRApps also has a section devoted to Adobe AIR news. What's really unique about this section is the type of news that's featured. Not only will visitors receive updates on the latest news from Adobe, but also news about applications that have been reviewed including upcoming releases and links to interviews of the developers.

Adobe AIR Tutorials and Resources
Due to FreshAIRApps' recent debut there are only two tutorials available. The provided tutorials are aimed at beginning developers of the Adobe AIR platform. The first tutorial features a host of information about the tools and technical skills you'll need to begin developing an application using the Adobe AIR platform. Also provided are links to Adobe AIR development extensions for Dreamweaver CS3 and Flash CS3.

The second tutorial provides developers with backgrounds in programming languages such as Flex, Flash, HTML, and AJAX with a great list of documentation resources to get started. Along with book recommendations, more resources can be found in the 'Resources' section of the site.

Supporting the Adobe AIR Community

Somewhat similar to the Veoh player, AMP is an AIR application that will allow users to watch Flash video content from the web online or offline. Unlike Veoh, however, AMP does not scrape content from the web, but instead is seeded by content publishers. Adobe will even offer co-branded versions of the player to publishers who can use it to monetize their content via advertising.

"Adobe Media Player enables us to work with content publishers and offer them innovative ways to create, deliver, and monetize high-quality video experiences that are supported both by streaming and download. By collaborating with these media and entertainment industry giants, we will be able to provide viewers an extensive catalog of their favorite shows for viewing at their convenience," promised Jim Guerard, vice president for Dynamic Media at Adobe in a press release.

AMP allows users to subscribe to online video content via RSS, so that your favorite videos are delivered to you and easier to find. For publishers, Adobe provides sophisticated analytics, monetization and branding options, and content protection. The cross-platform AMP player is free, and will be focused on free, ad-supported content for this beta release.

Note: Josh Catone is at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, September 30 - October 3, courtesy of Adobe.

"They ignored it until it was too late," Icaza said. "They were not looking out for the best interest of developers." According to Icaza, Adobe chose to focus at the time on apps for feature phones. Adobe's lack of foresight put the company in catch up mode and ultimately headaches and ridicule of the mobile industry leading to the news that Flash for mobile will soon die.

Flash forward more than four years later and Adobe finally has got the message.

"They dragged it on for months and months and three years down the line they finally kill it," Icaza said.

When Adobe finally did figure out that touch screen smartphones were the future and not just a fad, it created a glut of tools (like Adobe AIR and the AIR Marketplace) that tried to do a little bit for everyone. AIR has been built into the toolset for creating BlackBerry apps, especially for the QNX/BBX platform and Flash has been given Android compatibility since the release of Frozen Yogurt. What really makes little sense is how Adobe was not able to develop Flash to actually work well on mobile devices. The focus has long been on making sure that Flash can do more, more, more and be something for everybody. Adobe never took a step back and said that to do more, Flash may have to do less.

"It became too much of a tangle," Icaza said. "At the end of the day the focus on what was important was lost and what is important are the developers."

Icaza said that Adobe wanted to recreate the success of Flash mobile for feature phones in the same way that it succeeded in Japan, where there is a large commuter society that spends a lot of time on their phones while in transit to and from work. Icaza implied that it was this focus on trying to replicate this process was what blinded Adobe from the early stages of the most important evolution in computing since the advent of the World Wide Web.

"Adobe said that smartphones were going to be a niche," Icaza said.

In a blog post earlier this year, Icaza said that Flash ultimately became a second-class citizen within Adobe, taking a backseat to the developer tools that the company makes money from as opposed to the standard that many of them were built on.

"We were the darlings of the company," Icaza said. "And we were ignored."

And now, Adobe is going to focus on HTML5. To a certain extent, the cycle starts all over again. Adobe released EDGE and now FlashPro that will turn Flash into HTML5. Icaza said that Adobe will have a PR nightmare on its hands trying to convince its three million Flash developers to scrap projects in Flash and move to HTML5. If you read the Adobe Twitter account today, that push is well under way.

What do you think of the death of mobile Flash? Take our poll on the subject or let us let us know in the comments.