Flash Player 10.1 features availability for a range of devices, including smartphones, netbooks, and other Internet-connected devices, Adobe said. Content can be delivered across different OSes and devices. Also, SWF files can be deployed on devices with limited processing power.

For developers, a global error handler in AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 enables development of a single handler to process runtime errors that were not part of a try/catch statement. "This is a feature that's going to make developers more productive by more easily being able to find errors that are happening within their application," Everett-Church said.

AIR 2, for offline running of Web applications, offers enhanced support for mass storage devices, native application processes and peer-to-peer and UDP (User Diagram Protocol) networking, Adobe said. Users also can open a document within an AIR application, and performance is improved as well.

An updated version of the WebKit HTML engine in AIR 2 features a faster JavaScript engine. HTML5/CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets) 3 capabilities are in AIR 2, too. The local microphone access API in AIR 2 enables recording of audio locally, which benefits applications running in a disconnected mode, Adobe said. Improved socket support in AIR 2 enables development of local servers and lightweight P2P applications. Adobe at some point plans to enable AIR to run on devices.

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"What's happening now is in the process of bringing Flash Player 10 features and eventually AIR features as well to mobile, we are now working on a single code base and single environment," said Aaron Filner, Adobe group product manager for Adobe AIR.

Both AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 support multitouch and gesture-based applications on touch screen devices. The beta releases are available as free downloads from Adobe Labs. Flash Player 10.1 runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux desktop platforms and x86-based netbooks. Devices supported include Android, Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, and Symbian S60. The AIR 2 beta is offered for several Windows OSes, including Windows 7, as well as for Mac OS and Linux.

A public beta release of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm webOS is due later this year, with Google Android backing to follow in 2010.