Following the success of Adobe Air 1,Adobe has released Adobe Air 2 beta. The Adobe Air platform provides developers with a rich app development platform, tailored for the desktop. The success of Adobe Air is based on its cross OS capabilities which are achieved with the Adobe Air Runtime, which works pretty much like the Java Runtime. It allows us to run applications in a virtual environment. The Air 2 beta is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. The current release of Air 2 beta supports Fedora Core 11,  OpenSuse 11.1 and Ubuntu 9.04. Currently, it is supported only on 32-bit systems but 64-bit support is expected soon. The new version of Adobe Air has the following features:

• Opens any external file with the default system application specified by the user.
• Sound from the microphone can be directly accessed for recording.
• Mass storage devices can be detected as and when added or removed to a system.
• New networking features like listening to incoming server sockets and DNS lookup.
• Packaging an .air application into a native system specific installer.
• Multi touch support.
• Availability of the rpm and deb installers unlike the earlier bin installers.

Adobe Air is a great platform and has a rich set of applications. I am a big fan of TweetDeck, which is a good Twitter client. For a list of cool Adobe Air applications which will take your breath away, see this ^[1] post. Try Adobe Air 2 here ^[2].