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.

In Adobe AIR 2, apps can now detect when a mass storage device has been inserted into the computer. That means the app can "see" your USB flash drives, external drives, and even some digital cameras. For example, developers could build an app that recognizes when your Flip camera is plugged in and lets you automatically upload videos to YouTube.

To demo this capability, Adobe has released FileTile, a sample app that does just this (minus the video uploading). FileTile recognizes external devices and lets you see the files and open them with their default application.

Download Installer | Source

2. Native Process API

The native process API allows developers to better integrate their AIR apps with existing code libraries or extend their apps using native code. With the new native process API, this can now be done without compromising the cross-platform capabilities of AIR which allows it to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Developers using this new functionality can now deploy their apps with operating-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, .rpm, and .deb instead of an .air installer file.

To demonstrate the native process API, Adobe released SearchCentral, an application that taps into Mac OS X's Spotlight feature for desktop searches. It also lets you do web searches on Google and Wikipedia.

Installer | Source | How to

Here's a video explaining in more detail how the native API works:

3. Microphone Data Access

Like it sounds, the microphone data access feature lets you acquire the sound data from a computer's microphone without the need of a server. For example, a developer could build a note-taking application that lets users record audio clips even when they're offline.

To get started, a simple app called Microphone is now available which does recording and playback with variable playback speeds supported.

Download Installer | Source | How to

4. Drag-and-Drop Support for Remote Files

The new "file promises" feature of AIR 2 lets you drag remote files out of an AIR application. A file promise, as described by Adobe's Christian Cantrell, is "what you put on the clipboard when you want the user to be able to drag and drop files that do not yet exist, or that exist elsewhere (not locally on your machine)." It's a promise to deliver a file at some point, but not an actual file.

For example, an app could generate a CSV file but only when a user tries to drag and drop the file. It could also refer to files on a remote server, like an FTP server. When a user grabs that remote file and pulls it into the AIR app, the app could then download the data. It even supports files accessible via a URL like those hosted on Google Sites.

Unfortunately, this feature is Windows and Mac only.

A sample app called S3E provides a graphical front-end to your Amazon S3 account to demonstrate this feature.

Download Installer | Source | How to

5. Peer-to-Peer Networking Capabilities

Adobe AIR 2 also adds support for new networking capabilities including UDP, secure sockets and peer-to-peer. To demonstrate the possibilities, Adobe released KeePIPE, a javascript app that lets users on the same network share files using peer-to-peer technology. It also lets VMWare users transfer files between a virtual machine and a host computer.

Download Installer | Source | Read me

6. Multi-Touch

Perhaps the most exciting enhancement in AIR 2 and in Flash Player 10.1 are the new multi-touch APIs. In Windows 7, AIR apps can respond to multi-touch and in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, they can respond to gestures.

In this video (below), Adobe's Kevin Lynch demos a multi-touch app on an HP TouchSmart computer:

Obviously, Adobe is excited about this new feature, too, because they've released not one but four sample applications that demonstrate multi-touch in action:

• GeoTest: Lets you move images around the screen using a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source
• PhotoPhysics: A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source
• SpriteFract: A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine that demonstrates a mouse-compatible, direct-manipulation interface. It also uses PixelBender to asynchronously process a large amount of geometry data. Download Installer | Source
• TouchTest: Lets you drag, scale, and rotate images on the screen. Download Installer | Source

Other Features

Other features in Adobe AIR 2 include the following (courtesy of Rob Christensen):

• A new API lets you open documents with its default application
• Global error handling
• Enhanced printing support, including vector printing support on Mac and new APIs to query the local machine for a list of printers or print without a dialog box.
• WebKit in AIR 2 is now based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3 which includes support for JavaScript profiling, SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine performs 50% faster using SunSpider tests, CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors), styling scrollbars via CSS and Canvas enhancements.
• IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input.
• Increased maximum size of NativeWindow: AIR 2 apps can have a window size of 4095 x 4095 where before the maximum was 2880 x 2880.
• DNS lookup
• Network interface enumeration
• Database transaction savepoints
• Screen reader support in Windows
• IME API and IME text input enhancement
• Smaller runtime installer sizes
• More efficient CPU usage and reduced memory size

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.

Here's what we can look forward to for AIR 2.0.

Multitouch and Gestures

Mac users with multitouch hardware can already perform multitouch actions in AIR apps today, but this feature will be available for Windows users in the next version of AIR. Both Windows 7 and Mac users will get new support for gestures like press and tap, pan, zoom, swipe and rotate.

Think the design-savvy developers of the AIR world can come up with some awesome things to do with these new gestures? We suspect they will.

Local Audio Encoding

"Access audio data directly from the microphone," Cantrell writes, "You used to have to send the data to a server and access it from there, but now you can do it entirely on the client." With this increase in efficiency, we expect to see more AIR apps utilize audio. An AIR podcast recording app? That's an obvious idea, we'll see what else people come up with.

Improved Memory Use

AIR apps are memory expensive, that's probably the single biggest complaint about them. Cantrell says that AIR 2.0 will have lower CPU utilization when idle and lower memory consumption in general. That's great news. If Adobe can really pull this off and make dramatic cuts to AIR's memory requirement then AIR apps are going to see a big increase in adoption.

The New York Times for example, one of the most new-media capable old-school institutions in the US, recently asked its staff to stop using the AIR app Tweetdeck because it's such a memory hog. That's probably one of the reasons why Times staff appears to be posting to Twitter less these days.

AIR apps can offer a compelling user experience outside the browser but across computing platforms. We've had high hopes for AIR for a long time. These and other improvements could help AIR deliver on more of that promise.

Hopefully 2.0 won't be too long in coming.

See Also: 10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love

The way that Nomee's CEO Kevin Mokarow describes his new Adobe AIR application is that it lets you follow "people, not web sites." This is accomplished through the creation and exchange of "Nomee cards." In your card, you enter in your contact information and your social networking profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and hundreds more - anything with an RSS feed is supported. By creating Nomee cards for select groups, you can specify who gets to see what information. For example, if you want to share your card by posting it to your blog, you may want to include your Twitter, FriendFeed, and MySpace information, but not your Facebook profile. For your close friends, however, you could share a separate Nomee card which contains your Facebook profile info, too.

Nomee also provides pre-built cards for certain high-profile persons including celebrities, sports players, and the occasional politician (yes, it's Barack Obama). Anyone can subscribe to these cards just as anyone can subscribe to yours - and you don't have to reciprocate by accepting their card in return. It's entirely a one way experience.

Within the Nomee application the cards can be organized into groups and clicking on any user's information will display the number of updates per service in a very iPhone-esque fashion. You can also view a stream of that person's most recent updates across all their networks.

Some Issues

Obviously, keeping track of all your friends and colleagues in Nomee could be very inefficient since you have to click on users one-by-one to see their respective streams. The only other option for seeing friends' updates is turning on the desktop alerts - a feature you'll either love or hate. If you only have a few contacts, it may be nice to get the occasional pop-up, but most of us would be overrun with alerts.

The company intended this application to be a way to stay tuned into what your friends and other contacts are up to, but outside of those pop-ups, its interface makes this relatively time-consuming and inefficient. However, in playing with the application ourselves, we saw the potential for it to become a social address book. Of course, transforming the app from a stream-based aggregator to an address book would require some additional work on the company's part.

Still, the idea is intriguing - an address book that's filled not only with traditional contact info, but also with the status updates and other social data produced by that contact across the social networking arena. That could actually be a useful desktop application. Add a mobile sync feature and there could really be something there.

In order for this to come to pass, though, Nomee would have to add a lot more features. For example, it would have to allow you to build contacts on your own and it should let you accept vCards from others which you could then customize by entering in things like their Twitter username, etc. Supporting a standard like vCard is important because you can't assume that everyone is going to be creating these "Nomee cards."

At the moment, Nomee is somewhere in between web-based aggregation portals like FriendFeed (or, these days, Facebook's stream) and desktop-based AIR apps like TweetDeck's Twitter-tracking tool. The company needs to decide how committed they are to being an aggregation tool versus a social contact organizer. If it's the former, the current iteration somewhat fails for anyone with a decent amount of contacts to follow because it's just inefficient to track updates with this app. But if it's the latter, after some work Nomee could become a useful way to pull up contact information while also seeing a person's latest social activity.

We suppose that, to a point, you can use Nomee in this way right now. However, you're restricted to those who already have Nomee cards - which includes very few "real" people at the moment. (All you have are celebrity "news makers.") And without real people to follow, there isn't much you can do with a social application.

When reading your RSS feeds, do you prefer a local application versus one that is online-only? If so, look no further than ShareFire. Besides being platform-independent (courtesy of Adobe Air), it is also completely free and open-source. It was created with article sharing in mind, as its name implies. According to its creators, Christian Cantrell and Dan Koestler, this was a priority.

Additional features include a keyword-based notification system (which they call Smart Topics), posts arranged by topic, a switchable viewer between RSS and live web, and support for over a dozen foreign languages! You can also easily import and export OPML files you have generated from other utilities such as Google Reader or Toluu.

We found ShareFire to be on-par with other standalone feed readers when it comes to displaying and managing feeds. However, its built-in sharing links make it a cut above most basic readers and the alert system for keywords could come in very useful. One bug we did notice is that lack of any way of deleting a Smart Topic once created, and its somewhat heavy memory usage, even with only a few feeds in the queue.

More information can be found on Adobe's Air blog here.

With Queued, you can quickly access and modify your Netflix queue from your desktop, search for movies to add to your queue, rate movies, and you can even use the app to launch and view Instant Watch movies.

Since Adobe AIR lets the app run in the background, you can leave it running until you need it and when you return, there's no need to launch a browser and sign into Netflix - it's all right there for you. The app also alerts you when Netflix ships one of your movies so you know what's coming. And with AIR's offline capabilities, Queued lets you interact with it even when you have no internet connection. When the connection returns, your data will be automatically synced back to Netflix.

The Technical Details

On the Dojo side, the app uses a single HTML file for the main window, dAIR for Dojo/AIR integration, dijit for layout, unobtrusive behavior implementation using dojo.behavior, dojox.dtl for most widget templating, drag and drop for queue re-ordering, various animations for polish, and Dojo's build system.

On the AIR side, the app implements some of Adobe AIR's newest features including a local database, encrypted local storage, view source capability, automatic updates, and offline capability.

Go Get It!

The source code is available on Google code and the app itself is available for download from SitePen's web site, as they were the creators of the software.

The best way to understand TextFlow's feature set and interface is to try out one of the Flash demos on the company's website.

Elegant, but With Severe Limitations

Sadly, TextFlow's usefulness is restricted by a number of severe limitations. It can, for example, only handle files of less than 10 pages. TextFlow also can't handle images or charts and tables, which, depending on the type of documents you need to edit, might be a show-stopper. Up to seven editors can submit documents, which should be enough in most circumstances, but might be too restrictive for some.

According to TextFlow, a lot of its alpha users were in big corporations and law firms, and it is easy to see why these users would like TextFlow. We can also see how this would be a useful tool for students who want to work on a group project. TextFlow's current limitations, however, will leave a lot of users wanting for more.

In the future, TextFlow might switch from being an Adobe AIR application to a pure online model that will have fewer restriction, but if you often need to collaboratively edit relatively short and simple text documents, TextFlow is definitely a product that is worth a try.

That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.

Peldi says that while October was slower than September, and sales seemed to slow a bit when news of financial crisis was breaking out, so far November looks to be his biggest month yet.

He's got an active community of supporters cheering him on at his blog, too. He tracked the lead up to his launch, its aftermath and the product's early momentum right out in the open on his blog. He displays financial numbers throughout the blog. It's been a model of the paradigm of radical transparency and it's a whole lot of fun to watch.

What's next for Balsamiq? The tiny company has put together a remarkable board of advisors, Peldi has hired his wife Mariah to move from graphic design for the Balsamiq to a full time position, he's hired a few contractors and more projects are on the way soon.

We love stuff like this.

Moderator is a simple app that does its job well. The app provides you with notifications of how many comments are waiting on your approval both inside the app and also when the app is docked in your taskbar. Moderator also gives you the option of deleting, approving, or marking a comment as spam. You can also choose to view the gravatar of a commenter and set the refresh interval at up to 60 minutes. All of this is nicely packaged in a small and clean user interface.

Moderating Comments From Your Desktop

Developed by Daniel Dura, Moderator is a nifty AIR app and WordPress plugin that allows WordPress users to moderate comments from their desktop with ease. To get started, all you will need is version 2.6+ of WordPress and the latest version of Adobe AIR. To download Moderator, the app requires you to first install the Moderator plugin into your WordPress plugins directory. Doing so provides an added layer of security for your blog. Once the plugin is installed and activated you will be presented with a download link for the Moderator AIR app. As an early release, users may encounter some kinks and quirks depending on the amount of unmoderated comments you receive on a daily basis. However, Moderator is a great app to help you keep up with your comments as the day wears on, without having to constantly refresh your WordPress dashboard.

Update: Adobe PR wrote us to clarify that the announcement is not in fact that 25 million people have downloaded AIR but that 25 million AIR apps have been downloaded. That's less clear and less exciting, but is exactly the kind of PR fluff that agencies issue all too often. Have you got any real news or do you not have any real news? This kind of stuff drives us nuts and we apologize to our readers for the misunderstanding.

If you've been wondering when AIR would become more than an edge case platform to develop on, that time could be now. In fact, more than 850,000 developers have already downloaded the AIR software development kit, according to Adobe's Ryan Stewart. We think this is really good news.

We've written extensively about AIR here at RWW. See the following posts to find out more about what the excitement is about.

• The Best Things About Adobe AIR

  An overview of AIR's best qualities, like the fact that AIR apps can run on Windows and Mac desktops.



• Looking for cool AIR apps? Check out our posts 6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out, 10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love and Adobe AIR Goes to Work: 6 Apps for the Corporate Desktop.


• We like tracking AIR apps, but not as much as the folks at RefreshingApps.com do. That's a great place to find brand new apps on AIR. Each one is a joy to check out - they are so pretty!

Right: SearchCoders, a communications app for developers, built on AIR. Below: TweetDeck, one of many Twitter clients built on AIR, but our favorite right now.

Other Platforms

While video may be moving away from the Rich Internet App paradigm, see Joost's move from the desktop to the web for example, there's a lot of action going on in the RIA space beyond AIR. Not all video players are moving away from the desktop, either. See last week's release of a live streaming player in AIR for "news" from Fox News, for example.

We wrote about several other RIA platforms here in June. Competition is good and thanks to NBC's use of Microsoft's Silverlight to power streaming of the Olympics, Silverlight may very well have far more than 25 million now as well. Adobe's incredible dominance over the publishing technology used by creatives, by video publishers and others requires competition to keep the company honest.

The moral of the story is that RIA platforms and AIR in particular now have a significant install base and offering an application on this exciting new platform will be less onerous to many users than it would have been before. You may still be looked at like a freak if you talk about AIR apps at your family's holiday parties, but at tech parties you should now be in the clear.

In addition to the video feeds, there's also a live feed from FOX News Talk Radio. Another nice feature is the breaking news alerts. When the app is minimized, a small window will pop up from time to time when there's breaking news. The pop-up window will show the headline and the video. If you want to tune in, just click on it. If you ignore it, it will disappear in a moment or two. If that feature annoys you or you just need a break from distractions, you can easily turn it off from the Alert Settings in the app.

The last notable feature of the AIR app is the sharing feature. If you catch a video that you want to share with your friends, you can simply click the "Share" button to send them the video via email. Your friend receives a link to the video stream. The link delivers them to a page on the FOX News web site where they can watch the stream live.

If you want to check out this app yourself, you can download it from here. You will need to have Adobe AIR installed in order to install it.

Last week Vimeo published a blog post that the company is looking to take on a few developers. Vimeo is currently look for web application and flash developers with AIR development experience.

We're looking for superstar Flash developers:

• Do you have OOP experience in a language other than Flash?
• Does the prospect of your SWF being loaded 7 million times a day excite you?
• You have demonstrable design experience?
• Have you built a Flash video player before?
• Have you built Air applications?

Good News For Vimeo Users

If an AIR application does come down the pipeline, we're sure Vimeo users will be happy video campers. The description does enough to hint at a possible AIR app in the future and tons more. Vimeo users may also see some site changes and additions in the near future too if developers with these skillsets are signed on. Here's to hoping that a Vimeo AIR app comes soon!

For those who always have Facebook in a browser tab, the Facedesk application may hold some appeal. Essentially, this AIR app does nothing more than take the Facebook web site and place it into an Adobe AIR app. However, with Facedesk outside the browser, you can easily switch to it via Alt+Tab in Windows or Cmd+Tab on Mac. Beyond that, there isn't much to the application, but it was fun to check out nonetheless.

Zebr

The more useful of the two Facebook AIR apps is definitely Zebr. This AIR app reminds me of Twhirl for Facebook status updates. From Zebr, you can keep tabs on your friends' status changes as well as update your own. In addition, the app also keeps you updated on incoming messages and wall posts. When you're not using it, you can minimize Zebr to your system tray to keep it out of the way - alerts will still display as they come in. Zebr is available from their application page on Facebook.

Flair

Flair, like Zebr, is an app that keeps you in touch with your Facebook friends throughout the day without you having to login to the web site. Flair will alert you when you're poked, someone writes on your wall, or adds you as a friend. However, unlike Zebr, you are not alerted to friends status' updates. Although Flair does alert you to various items, in order to interact with Facebook - like, for example, to add new friends - you'll still need to login to the Facebook web site. Flair also minimizes to the system tray when not in use.

The new Adobe Photoshop Express Uploader lets you browse for photos to add to the uploader tool. As you add photos, you can choose to add them to one of your existing albums in Photoshop Express or you have the option to create a new one. In order to use the uploader, you'll need to sign in with your Adobe ID. (Since their launch of the Adobe online office suite available through Acrobat.com, all their apps now recognize a commonly-shared set of credentials: your Adobe ID.)

Other new features now available in Photoshop Express include:

• The ability to get prints of digital photos from Shutterfly
• The ability to add music to slideshows (pick a track from the Settings panel)
• A new resizing tool that lets you pick a preset image size for mobile, web, profile, or email - resize with one click or choose custom to set your own width and height
• Tagging photos is now possible
• The ability to download photos from anyone's public album or straight from a slideshow

One Small Problem: It Doesn't Work

Unfortunately, upon testing the new AIR app, I ran into a problem - it simply did not work. As I attempted to upload some small JPG images, I would receive an error message reading that the files were "unsupported." According to the message, the JPGs needed to be less than 10 MB in size and smaller than 4000x4000. Well, they were. I tried multiple files with the same results, so clearly there is something wrong there. Photoshop Express also only supports JPG photos so I could not attempt to upload any PNGs.

For the casual photographer, it's difficult to see how Photoshop Express can really compete here - especially now that Flickr provides basic photo editing tools, too, courtesy of Picnik. The niche they've carved out for Photoshop Express is very small: either you're deeply embedded with the Adobe line of products or you need better tools than Picnik and don't want to pay for either Photoshop Elements or Photoshop itself. That isn't a whole lot of people just now.

Adobe would be better off figuring out how to integrate the program into their suite of online office products. Imagine the value in being able to insert photos into Buzzword from Photoshop Express, and, after editing, having Buzzword automatically update itself with the revised photo. Now that would be something! Instead, we have an isolated app and a broken AIR uploader. We know Adobe can do better than this, so we're still optimistic that they will do so soon.

It's a great story of a creative entrepreneur using new technology to address a key market need and finding a healthy number of customers willing to pay for software. Balsamiq lets users drag and drop a library of common design elements around a work space, then export their final product in PNG or into a Confluence wiki. It seems like something that could cut design work headaches down substantially. Demo video below.

Check out the demo video below and drop by the website for a fast free trial of the software, too. You'll probably be ready to drop $79 on it as well.

Balsamiq aims to offer a variety of "web office plug-ins" and we look forward to seeing what the company comes up with next.

Don't be fooled - this is app is no ordinary desktop music player. Instead of simply streaming tunes, Fanbase lets you connect with other users through an integrated chat feature while also viewing a continuous feed of both the official and the unofficial news, photos, and videos. You can also customize the app by choosing which artists you want it to display from the dropdown menu or the "Manage" screen.

To create Fanbase, Atlantic Records collaborated with imeem, the music social networking site that lets users upload, create, and listen to music. Through the integrated imeem music player, Fanbase will automatically capture the latest music from any particular artist and stream it directly into the player. Fanbase's video content comes from YouTube and Brightcove and the chat feature is provided by Meebo.

"We're always looking to elevate the experience and interaction our fans have with our artists," said Eric Snowden Creative Director of Digital Media for Atlantic Records. "Through Fanbase we're delivering that experience digitally, on-demand and in a manner that allows fans to create a much deeper connection with their favorite artists."

We only wish that an app as rich as Fanbase wasn't limited to just one record label - a collaborative effort between labels would have really made Fanbase a killer app. However, if your favorite artist is with Atlantic Records, you may want to give it a shot. To try Fanbase for yourself, you can download it from here.