Another excellent session at Adobe MAX this year was presented by members of our Experience Design team. The session description was the following:

Learn from Jeremy Clark of Adobe's Experience Design team how his group has leveraged Adobe AIR, Flex, and the Text Layout Framework (now in beta on Adobe Labs) to help the New York Times and others reach new and existing customers.

Adobe AIR team member Oliver Goldman presented a session titled "Explore Deployment and Distribution Options for Adobe AIR Applications" at Adobe MAX last week. This is an excellent session for IT administrators, developers or architects that are interested in learning more about the distribution and deployment options for AIR. Oliver also previews some of the new capabilities we are working on related to native installer support in AIR 2 (see 38:30 if you are interested in this specific topic).

Last week, we were thrilled to preview Adobe AIR 2 at Adobe MAX where we unveiled some of the new capabilities coming to the runtime. In addition, there were dozens of sessions covering AIR ranging from application case studies to deployment strategies and more.

During the rest of this week, I will be highlighting a few of the AIR-related sessions. I encourage you to explore and discover the over 250 hours of content in the design, develop and envision tracks that covered topics ranging from Photoshop to ColdFusion to LiveCycle and beyond. All of this content is currently available on Adobe TV. Please note that some of the recordings may not start right away and you may need to fast-forward a bit (the team at Adobe.TV did an amazing job of getting these sessions online as quickly as possible).

The first session I would like to highlight is What's Coming in Adobe AIR 2 by Adobe AIR team member Christian Cantrell. If you are interested in what some of the new API's will look like in AIR 2, this is a session you will definitely want to check out.

At Adobe MAX in Los Angeles today, we previewed the next major release of Adobe AIR to thousands of Adobe customers and partners. Several exciting new capabilities of the AIR runtime were demonstrated by Adobe's CTO, Kevin Lynch, as part of the "day one" keynote. In addition, Christian Cantrell, a member of the AIR engineering team, presented a session titled "What's Coming in AIR 2" that provided a more detailed sneak peak of some of the upcoming features of the AIR runtime (stay tuned -- we will soon be posting a recording of Christian's talk).

After shipping AIR 1.0, many of developers challenged us to open the runtime up even more by, for example, allowing communication with native processes and providing enhanced networking support. With AIR 2, our goal from the outset was to remove limitations in the runtime that prevented developers from building their applications.

Some of the capabilities that are coming in AIR 2 include:

• Native process API
  Beginning with AIR 2, developers will have access to a native process API that will enable applications to invoke and communicate with native applications on the local machine. In order to preserve the cross platform nature of the .air file format, applications that take advantage of the native process API must be deployed as native installers such as .exe and .dmg. The AIR runtime SDK will include support for generating basic native installers.  
• Support for detecting mass storage devices
  Now your AIR application can detect when a mass storage device is connected or disconnected. An AIR 2 application can listen for when a user plugs in a Flip video camera or USB Flash drive so that it can, for example, automatically synchronize files to the local system or prompt the user to upload photos to Facebook or videos to YouTube.
• Improved support for accessibility
  Runtime dialogs such as the installer dialogs will be readable by supported screen readers such as JAWS. In addition, it will be possible to build accessible Flash-based applications in AIR leveraging the existing accessibility API's and features available in the Flash Player and Flex SDK.
• Open document API
  Support for opening a document will be possible from an AIR application. With this API, AIR asks the operating system what the default application is associated with the file. For example, specifying a file path to a PDF file will launch Adobe Reader or a .doc file will open Microsoft Word.
• Improved performance
  Applications that run using AIR 2 will consume less memory and use less CPU than AIR 1.5 without recompiling the application. We will share more information about this when we launch the beta.
• Local microphone access API
  Currently, audio must first pass through a server before it can be saved locally. Using the upcoming AIR 2 local microphone API, it will be possible to record audio locally, which can be important if your application is running in a disconnected mode.
• Multi-touch & gesture support
  AIR 2 will include support for multi-touch (Windows 7) and gestures (Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6).  
• Faster, more powerful WebKit
  An updated version of WebKit that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities will be included inside of AIR 2.
• Improved socket support
  It will now be possible to create local servers and lightweight P2P applications with enhancements to AIR's socket support.

In the coming weeks leading up to the beta, we will begin sharing more information including videos, articles and blog posts about some of these new capabilities. We are extremely eager to get the public beta into your hands so that we can begin incorporating your feedback.

We expect to ship a beta version of Adobe AIR 2 on Adobe Labs by the end of the year. In the first half of 2010, we expect to ship the final version of AIR 2.

Adobe MAX is less than two weeks away and members of our team are working around the clock in preparation for the event. For those of you interested in AIR and learning more about what we have been up to in the past year, please be sure to sign-up for the sessions listed below. All of these sessions will be presented by members of the Adobe AIR team. As a manager for the AIR track at this year's MAX, I have been deeply impressed by the quality of content this year and I am very much hoping many of you will be able to join us.

A few pointers for MAX this year:

• If you are interested in learning more about what is coming in AIR 2, do not miss Christian Cantrell's session on the topic (see session summaries at the bottom of this page).
• If mobile application development is anywhere on your radar, there are two must-see sessions by AIR team members. Again, session descriptions are listed at the bottom of this post.
  • One session, presented by Arno Gourdol and titled "Designing Applications for Desktops and Mobile Devices with Adobe AIR," will cover how to build applications than span both desktop and mobile. This is an exciting topic and core to Adobe's multi-screen vision for application development.
  • The second session, presented by Aditya Bansod, is titled "Building Mobile Applications with Adobe AIR" and will focus on mobile application development. The session will cover new ground and there will be two instances of Aditya's session.
• Oliver Goldman, lead developer on the AIR team, is presenting a session titled: "Explore Deployment and Distribution Options for Adobe AIR Applications." For those of you looking to better understand the full set of options available to you in terms of deploying your AIR applications and the AIR runtime to end users, this session will provided a detailed look at what is possible today and new options that will be made available in AIR 2.
• One of the most groundbreaking Adobe AIR applications to date is the popular Times Reader built by the New York Times in collaboration with Adobe. Jeremy Clark, an experience design manager at Adobe, will be presenting on how this application was created from the ideation to production phases. Jeremy's team led the creation of the application on the Adobe side and he will be sharing his experiences during the design and development process. In reviewing the slides, I expect this session will be a huge source of inspiration for many developers.
• On Monday night, there will be a "meet the team" session in room 512 where members of the AIR and Flash Player teams will be available to answer your questions. Pizza, beer and other beverages will be provided. This is a great chance to learn more about Adobe's runtime technologies from the engineers and product managers that work on these products day-to-day. For more information on meet the team events, see the evening events section on the MAX website..
• If you would like to stop by and say hello, I will be at the platform demo station located in the Adobe booth on Monday (10/5) from 2:00PM - 4:00PM and Wednesday (10/7) from 1:30PM - 3:30PM. Please stop by to introduce yourself and tell me more about what you are working on. If you are not able to catch me, drop me a note on Twitter (@robchristensen) and we can try and meet-up.

What's Coming in Adobe AIR 2 by Christian Cantrell

Adobe AIR allows developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems. In this session, you will learn about the planned capabilities of the upcoming release of Adobe AIR 2.

Designing Applications for Desktops and Mobile Devices with Adobe AIR by Arno Gourdol

See how Adobe AIR has made it possible for web developers to build cross-platform desktop applications. Learn how the platform is expanding to enable the delivery of applications not just for desktop operating systems, but also for mobile devices.

Building Mobile Applications with Adobe AIR by Aditya Bansod (2 sessions)

Learn how Adobe is working to bring Adobe AIR development out of the desktop and onto a mobile phone near you. We will cover how the AIR SDK and platform will evolve to add capabilities to help developers mobile enable, test, and publish their content. Mobile computing and mobile applications provide publishers and developers with exciting opportunities to get their products into the pockets of millions of people.

Explore Deployment and Distribution Options for Adobe AIR Applications by Oliver Goldman

Learn how to get your AIR applications to your users and how to keep them up to date. We will discuss important considerations for distribution on the Internet or an intranet, including impacts on your auto-update mechanism. We will cover existing deployment options such as badge installation and IBM Tivoli support. Finally, we will explore the new deployment options that will be available in Adobe AIR 2, including the native installer support required to use some of the advanced new AIR 2 APIs.

The Future of Digital Publishing: Delivering News through Adobe AIR by Jeremy Clark

Learn from Jeremy Clark of Adobe's Experience Design team how his group has leveraged Adobe AIR, Flex, and the Text Layout Framework (now in beta on Adobe Labs) to help the New York Times and others reach new and existing customers with a revolutionary desktop news application.