Adobe recently released version 3.5 of the Flex SDK, the freely available SDK for developing and deploying Flex applications. This is a minor update that fixes bugs and security issues, but it is still worth checking out by Flex developers. You can download the new SDK from Adobe’s website.

Adobe released today the beta editions of Adobe Air 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1, the next two major releases for both technologies. The most major feature added to both is the support for multi-touch input – which, however, cannot be used without having a device that support multi-touch such HP TouchSmart or a Dell Latitude XT2 running Windows 7. The FAQs say that you should be able to interact with the gestures of the multi-touch pads of Macbook Pros, but I couldn’t get mine to work with the samples available online.

Other additions to AIR 2.0 include support for the detection of mass storage devices, access to raw microphone data, the ability to open a file with its default application and other new improvements. These editions are going to help increase the popularity of using the Adobe AIR platform for creating cross-platform desktop applications with online functionality.

The new release of Flash Player 10.1 is meant to be the first step for creating a consistent Flash experience across desktop and mobile platforms, however, the beta for this edition of the player is now only available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. Though not available for mobile phones yet, but this player should be the one to properly allow the use of AS3 on mobile devices.

You can check out the demos by visiting the links above and check out sample movies to showcase the capability of the new players. I test Adobe AIR 2.0 on my Macbook Pro and it seems to work just fine.

Adobe Labs released yesterday a beta AS3 Class called Squiggly that operates as a spell check engine for Flash Player 10 movies and Adobe AIR projects. The spell-check engine will underline wrongly spelled words and will show suggested corrections in the right-click context menu.

Squiggly could be used in with Flash Professional or Flash Builder, but currently the class relies on Flex UI components to underline the text, however, developers may write their own UI interface to be able to use Squiggly without relying on any Flex component. You can learn more about Squiggly and download it for free from this link.

Adobe recently released a new product in Labs called Adobe Wave, which is basically a service tied to an AIR application to send updates directly to the desktop of end users. It serves the same function as a desktop based RSS reader, but is proprietary, does not read regular RSS feeds, and has no web based access for users to check the latest updates. The service will probably not have any wide spread due to the effort necessary for publishers to set up their feeds and integrate the Wave API into existing feeds.

Anyway, Flash developers should still check it out because it is a great example of a light-weight AIR application that has a nice simple interface and great web connectivity.

You can learn more about Adobe Wave at Adobe Labs.

Google unveiled in an short FAQ the list of partners working with Google on the Chrome OS and this list includes a some hardware manufacturers and Adobe. Though no explanation of the nature of partnership between Adobe and Google has been provided, it is most likely to be related to the integration of Adobe AIR into the Chrome OS. Adobe AIR is one of the most popular technologies for creating lightweight desktop applications with web functionality and has become the de facto technology for creating desktop based Twitter clients such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. Its inclusion in the Google OS would ensure the availability of all AIR applications for the users of Chrome.

It is very unlikely for the partnership of Adobe with Google to involve the development of a CS suite or any other professional Adobe product for Chrome as this OS is currently targeted only for netbooks which are unlikely to be able to handle processor intensive programs or 3D graphics.

You can read the Chrome OS FAQ here.

Google announced yesterday it’s intention to release an operating system focused around its browser Chrome and web technologies. The Chrome OS will be built on top of the Linux kernel and will be targeted at netbooks. The OS will enable native use of web applications and will enable developers to create applications for the OS using web technologies. Google announced that the OS will be available to consumers in the second half of 2010.

The Google Chrome OS will probably not be for everyone as it will focus on web based applications which have yet not reached the stage at which they can replace specialist applications such as Photoshop CS4 or Flash CS4. It will be very unlikely for these applications to be ported to this OS, however the OS is clearly targeted at the mass consumer market through netbooks and not professional users.

In terms of project deployment, Flash developers should not worry about having their web based projects run on Chrome OS as the Chrome browser supports Flash, but the same could not be said about Adobe AIR projects which require the installation of the AIR runtime at the OS level. However, AIR is currently available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. As Chrome OS will open source and based on Linux, it is very likely for Adobe to release AIR for the Chrome OS as Adobe has supported other similar Google projects (i.e. Android).

You can learn more about the Chrome OS by checking the announcement at the Google Blog and TechCrunch.

 Do not get confused by the title of this post, this is not the AS3 API for the iPhone, nor the AS3 Player for the iPhone, Mike Chamber created an iPhone application for checking the AS3 API “Reference” for the Flash Player, Flex, and Adobe AIR on the go. There is still no way for playing Flash content on the iPhone and it does not seem like that would ever happen.

I’m not really sure why you would ever need the have the AS3 reference on your iPhone, and even if you really wanted to you could always have been able to view it on Adobe’s website, but anyway, if for some reason you still feel like having the AS3 Reference on your iPhone you can now download it for free from the iTunes store. You can run this on an iPhone or the iPod Touch.

[via PixelFumes]

 Aviary web based creative application suite finally came out of beta minutes ago. Aviary for those who do not know about it is a web based application suite built on the Flash platform that lets you carry out various creative tasks such as image editing, drawing, color palette creation, and filter editing without the need to install any special software on your machine by using their web applications.

Aviary has also uncovered its paid Pro service which lets users have unlimited storage space and access to additional applications such as Raven (Vector drawing tool).

I have tried Aviary in the past, but I thought that was too much of a hassle for doing simple tasks such as cropping an image and adding some text to it to use for a blog post (I prefer Picnik) , yet it was not powerful or fast enough to replace my beloved offline Fireworks application. However, some of your might still have a place for it in your workflow. You can try out Aviary and use its basic service free of charge by visiting their official website at Aviary.com.

Artweaver is a Freeware application that includes most of Adobe Photoshop’s basic tools and a similar interface that previous photoshop users can easily become accustomed to. If your looking forward to using a lighter photo editing application, Artweaver offers various selection tools, brushes, shape tools, color palettes, filters, tablet support and much more. You can download Artweaver for free, the installation file size is only 8.8 MBs in size and different language packs are available for download as well.

[via DownloadSquad]

Atmosphir is a new gaming development platform that was announced at the recent TechCrunch50 conference. The interesting thing about it is that it lets you create rich 3D platform games (which are very similar to Mario 64) by simply dragging and dropping Lego-like blocks on a virtual canvas. The video above shows gameplay and development tools and they both seem quite fun. Games created on Atmosphere can be shared on the platform’s website to let others play and/or edit them if they wish. 

Atmosphir games are created and played using a desktop client for PC and Mac which is currently only available in a private beta (you can sign up for an invitation here). The client will be available for free once the project is fully launched towards the end of 2008.

For more info on Atmosphir you can visit their official website or view the transcript of the Q&A session of Atmosphir during TechCrunch50.