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One of the unambiguous messages we heard from Microsoft's Build 2011 conference in Anaheim all last week was that development of HTML5 "Metro-style apps" for Windows 8 would be "plug-in free." All requests for Microsoft to "clarify" that rule only underscored the blunt reality of the statement: HTML5 is about the absence of plug-ins, and thus, Metro will have an absence of plug-ins, including Microsoft's own Silverlight.

In a company blog post dated last Thursday, Adobe platform business developer Danny Winokur said his company expects for apps installed in the Metro Start Screen to be capable of supporting Adobe's AIR platform, one way or the other. His comments echoed an emergent theme from Adobe - a clever effort to rework the HTML5 "openness" theme in Flash's favor. By being platform-agnostic, the argument goes, HTML5 should look the other way when any plug-in is being utilized.

This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe provided an update on how its Flash and AIR technologies have performed over the course of 2010, specifically in terms of penetration results. Thanks in no small part to the rise of Android devices, Flash adoption has topped Adobe's earlier forecasts. At the Adobe MAX Developer Conference earlier last year, Adobe had forecasted 9% of mobile phones would support Flash in 2010, but as of year-end, the actual number was 12%.

There are now 35+ certified mobile devices that support Flash, says Adobe, and 20 million mobile phones running the plugin.

The preview of the Melrose Beta SDK from Adobe allows for Adobe AIR apps to be integrated into online stores such as the Intel AppUp center. The Atom Developer Program offers the SDK and accepts AIR apps. Now that AIR applications are supported in AppUp, it's probably a good idea to take inventory of what this means for developers.

Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., is coming to the TV screen, the company announced today at its developer conference Adobe MAX 2010. With the launch of Adobe AIR 2.5, the software, already supported on various smartphone, tablet and desktop platforms, is being extended to televisions with the first AIR-enabled TV shipping in Q1 2011.

The Adobe AIR for Android runtime is now available in the Android Market, news which is sure to excite a number of Flash developers. With the new application, developers can build mobile applications for Android users without having to learn new languages. Instead, they can continue using familiar programs like Flash Builder, Flash Professional CS5 or an ActionScript development tool.

For end users, the availability of AIR means, simply put, new apps to try. Searching for "Adobe AIR" in the Market will now reveal a selection of apps that are built with AIR.

Love Linux? Love your Mac? No you don't - not like the hundreds of people out there with Apple and Tux tattoos. But even then, that's not hard core - it's not like Apple is just a Web 2.0 darling du jour.

Today at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced several initiatives designed to cement their company's relevance in a world where Apple, one of the top smartphone players, has banned Adobe software from inclusion on all mobile devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-launch iPad. Without Adobe's Flash runtime, thousands of websites don't work, streaming videos won't play and a number of online casual games are broken. Apple, of course, is fine with this, having worked around the issue thanks to the 150,000+ iPhone applications that deliver the same functionality...although sometimes for a fee.

Adobe, meanwhile, is focusing on the other up-and-coming smartphone platform, Google's Android OS, with the launch of their "AIR for Android" offering. With this and the newly announced Flash Player 10.1, wannabe mobile developers don't need to learn specialized code, but can instead leverage their existing development skills to build Flash and AIR-based applications. They can then have those apps run anywhere: PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile...including, surprisingly, the iPhone.

Today Adobe released new beta versions of the company's Flash Player and AIR. The Flash Player 10.1 technology now includes HTTP streaming and hardware decoding of H.264 video. The company plans to bring the updated Flash Player to mobile devices too, starting with the Palm Pre and then completing versions for other major smartphones by the first half of 2010 (with the notable exception of the iPhone, of course).

However, out of the two updates, it's Adobe AIR 2 that received the biggest overhaul. The new runtime allows developers to create entirely new types of applications that simply weren't possible using AIR 1. What sort of apps are those? Adobe's gallery of sample apps should give you some ideas of what's to come.

Microblogging clients, media players, news tickers and more built on Adobe's popular Rich Internet App framework AIR will soon become a lot more powerful and efficient.

Version 2.0 of AIR will hit Adobe Labs later this year and be available for everyone in the first half of 2010, the company said this week. A good list of new features were blogged about by Adobe's Christian Cantrell yesterday and below are a few of our favorites.

Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a company called Nomee is revealing a new software application for the purpose of aggregating all your social networking sites into a single desktop experience. In a way, this software is somewhat reminiscent of the web-based PeopleBrowsr in the sense that it's attempting to pool all your networks and identities into one single window. However, unlike PeopleBrowsr, Nomee is not just aggregation software - it also functions as a social identity management tool, letting you control which identities are shared with which people. That makes Nomee more like a next-gen social address book than anything else.