Adobe AIR 2.0 Release Official!

Adobe AIR 2.0 was officially released today by Adobe. What does that mean to you as a developer? If you haven’t checked out the latest features in AIR 2.0 or Adobe AIR at all, now is the time! Adobe AIR allows you to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) for the desktop. It offers all the benefits of an RIA outside the confines of a browser and provides access to the File System, local database (SQLite), online/offline capabilities and more. The version 2.0 released today adds native process support, multi-touch and gesture handling, microphone capabilities, socket communication and other important features worth checking out. I recently worked on a bunch of samples for Tour de Flex that show off many of the new features in Adobe AIR 2, they can be found here.

The Adobe AIR runtime and SDK are both downloadable for free. AND… one of the most exciting and compelling reasons you should make it a point to start building apps with AIR is that you will soon be able to go mobile! Check out the AIR for Android program to see how you can write AIR apps that run natively on your Android device! I’ve built a couple of apps myself for my Nexus One and I’m personally very excited about how easy it is. You can have the same application running from your desktop that could be communicating with a LiveCycle Data Services server or BlazeDS ported over to your mobile device in minutes. An example of one such application can be found here.

You can also check out the Adobe AIR Marketplace to find oodles of AIR apps for download.