The AIR for Android runtime is now available in Android Market, enabling developers to push mobile AIR apps built with Adobe’s developer platform. You’ll need a handset equipped with Android 2.2 (Froyo) and obviously this doesn’t mean you’ll be able to run your native AIR desktop apps like you know them on your phone.

They’ll need to be specifically built for mobile devices, as Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart points out.

There are only a couple of apps for AIR for Android so far, but another Adobe evangelist, Serge Jespers, has started a list of available applications on AppBrain and promises to keep it updated.

To be honest, that list needs to be filled with a lot more (and more robust) apps before one can actually thoroughly evaluate AIR for Android as a platform at face value, so for now consider this a soft launch.

Last fall, TechCrunch50 startup ClientShow presented its innovative application to help creative, advertising and marketing professionals show, pitch, share and sell their work to clients more effectively through real-time collaboration and communication. Similar to a WebEx for creative professionals, ClientShow allows users to essentially create a “virtual agency” to collaborate and share ideas with clients. This week, the startup is debuting its platform in private beta. We have 1000 invites for Techcrunch readers here.

The application, which is built on Adobe Air, includes a dashboard which lets the agency view client lists, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can view the projects.

To engage in a virtual “pitch,”clients are given a link that lets them view the session in their browser. While the users who are pitching the idea are using an Adobe Air application, the client will see the actual pitch within their browser. Here’s where ClientShow brings in the collaboration angle: as you are pitching an idea, decision makers on a client team can approve (or dismiss) different ideas and files and give feedback automatically by adding notes and comments to the pitch that are updated in realtime.

After a pitch has ended, users will want to look back on clients’ comments and feedback, which is where the fourth part of ClientShow’s software comes in. The “vault” captures and stores all interactive feedback from sessions. You can also see session reports”in the vault that shows you every file that was documented in the presentation in the order they were presented.

The entire application is free, but ClientShow will be monetizing by offering a paid version that includes additional premium features. The startup has raised $750,000 in funding so far from undisclosed angel investors and will be launching the application to the public in the next two months.

Of course, my one complaint about the application is that it is built off of Adobe Air which is buggy and has other problematic issues. However, the realtime collaboration functionality of the application is compelling. The ability to create threaded discussions around a pitch and collaborate easily is sure to be useful to the creative industries.

Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.

Update: sorry, we unintentionally – no, really – jumped the gun on this one. The links to the products are now live: Flash Player and AIR.

People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience.

But first things first.

Both the new Flash Player for desktop browsers and the latest iteration of the rather popular cross-platform runtime environment for desktop apps were announced in the beginning of October and previewed at the recent Adobe MAX 2009 event (see video below). That means there aren’t too many surprises left with regards to what the upgraded versions bring, so we’ll just give you a quick run-down.

Both Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1:

- boast support for multi-touch and gestures (yes, you’d need a machine with a touch screen)
- include a global error handler, which enables devs to write a single handler to process all runtime errors
- (finally) support local microphone access, so you’ll no longer need to first pass through a server in order to record audio locally on both Flash Platform runtimes

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 now also leverages hardware decoding of H.264 video on Windows PCs, netbooks and mobile devices.

Want all that goodness on your mobile phone, too? Hold your horses: while a public beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Palm webOS is expected later this year, Google Android support is expected no sooner than early 2010, and support for Blackberry smartphones will likely take even more time to be added.

Also new in Adobe AIR 2.0 and worthy of a mention:

- Native process API: enables apps to communicate with native applications on local machines
- Mass storage device detection: plug in your Flip camera or that USB stick you got as a gift at the last conference you attended, and AIR 2 applications will be able to detect them
- Open document API: with it, AIR apps can ‘ask’ the OS what the default application is associated with files and function accordingly
- Improved socket support: think AIR-powered local servers and P2P apps
- Speedier WebKit: updated version that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities

(Original image via Ryan Stewart)

I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem – it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.

Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.

We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery.

In the meantime, we all downloaded Gabble, a native OSX Yammer client, and everything is smooth sailing again.

On to the news: by means of a blog post, Adobe Systems has just confirmed the number of installs for Adobe AIR that had been floating around the Web ever since CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned something along those lines at the recent Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco: 200 million, double the amount the company touted at the end of January 2009. The number was reached a little over two weeks ago, about 16 months after its debut on the market.

Whether you’re aware that you’ve installed Adobe AIR at some point or not, or whether you think the 200 million installs is actually on the low rather than the high side (I think the number is fairly moderate), there are some really good applications out there that you don’t know yet but might want to check out:

imeem Uploader :

Allows users to upload music, videos, and photos to imeem. This app will automatically discover all your iTunes playlists and enable you to easily zip them over to your imeem profile. You can also drag and drop your desired tracks for upload to imeem, create custom playlists and share your music with others.

Flair:

An elegant search tool for Flickr, which utilizes several methods of its public API. Flair matches search queries by tags and makes it easy to jump to the original resolution upload (often easily wallpaper quality) and the source photographers photostream (by clicking their user icon).

Comapping:

An intuitive and extensive desktop app for mind-mapping purposes, tied to web app Comapping.com. Use it to manage and share information more efficiently.

NetBook:

Ebook reader for the Gutenberg online book library. Ebooks are available free of charge in both text and audio format. NetBook lets you search the Gutenberg database, download and read/listen to ebooks and store them in cache for offline use.

MyMediaPlayer:

Yes, Hulu has an official desktop application too, but this one is worth a second look (we’ve covered this one before). MYMediaplayer allows users to browse the Hulu library while watching videos, and you can dock the window to the side of the monitor so you can work and watch TV at the same time. Perfect for procrastination!

You can find these and 500 other applications on the AIR Marketplace.

The company made the announcement at the Adobe MAX Japan event, notably less than one year after the official release of Adobe AIR.

Adobe says the 100 million mark for Adobe AIR installs is a minimum for the total install base of the AIR runtime (read: they think it’s actually more than that) since they only count the ones that are deemed 100% successful (i.e. they can be confirmed by code running after the installation). As for developers building Web applications using the Adobe Flash Platform, the company claims that in the last 12 months there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder.

Based on the results of a Millward Brown survey, Adobe also boasts that Flash Player 10 has been installed on 55% of computers worldwide, and they expect to surpass 80% penetration by next quarter. In total, no less than 99% of internet-enabled desktops are said to have at least some version of Flash Player installed. You can see the percentages broken down by version here but keep in mind that the numbers come from Adobe.

As we’ve noted before, Flash Player is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones.

For the sake of comparison, the last time Microsoft shared numbers on its Flash Player competitor Silverlight was when the company released Silverlight 2 in October 2008. They didn’t publish actual install numbers, but said the adoption rate was nearing 50 percent in some countries and 30 percent in the U.S.

Going back to Adobe AIR, in a blog post the company’s Group Manager, Flash Platform Product Marketing Adrian Ludwig says that the vast majority of installations are driven by applications rather than people going to Adobe.com to install the runtime environment.

Ludwig cites TweetDeck, Twhirl, AOL Top 100 Videos and eBay Desktop among the most popular applications (full list). I personally use AIR powered desktop applications Twhirl, Yammer, Google Analytics Reporting Suite, Finetune Desktop and Snackr the most.

What about you?

Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up.

Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Here’s a summary:

1. Release of Adobe AIR 1.5. The Adobe AIR client now has better performance and memory handling, but most importantly it supports Flash Player 10 and Webkit (which is what the mobile browsers in both the iPhone and Android are based on). Flash Player 10 means more 3-d graphics. This version of AIR will also include an encrypted database that should appeal to developers of enterprise apps.

2. Flash Catalyst and Gumbo. Adobe is reaching out beyond its core base of developers with a new set of tools. Catalyst (previously known as Thermo), streamlines the hand-off between graphic designers and developers. It creates a two-way bridge between files created in Adobe’s Creative Suite products such as Photoshop as Illustrator, and Web apps built in Flash or AIR.
Adobe will be making some announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Catalyst basically converts everything back and forth. In a similar vein, Gumbo (aka, Flex Builder 4) will try to appeal beyond core Java developers to script kiddies of all stripes and sizes. It will be available as a preview release

3. Mobile Flash. Flash will be demoed on Windows Mobile.

4. A 64-bit Flash Player For Linux. A preview will become available at Adobe Labs.

5. Dynamic streaming comes to Flash media server. The server software can now deliver Flash video at different quality, depending one the bandwidth and device of the viewer.

TokBox, the impressive video chat startup that doesn’t require any kind of extra software, has launched a new AIR app that will bring the web service’s easy setup to the desktop. Thanks to Adobe’s AIR platform, the software will be cross-compatible and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.

The client offers a very simple interface that should be familiar to anyone who has ever used Skype. Users can access all of TokBox’s standard features, which include Video Calls, Instant Messages, and Video Mail. Beyond the easy interface, the client also improves on the TokBox experience by giving users instant notification whenever a contact initiates a chat with them, and also allows them to set their availability status so that others know when they can be contacted. The app also generates a standard TokBox link, so that users can invite their friends to the chat even if they don’t have the client.

The new client should appeal to frequent users of the site, but it seems a little counterintuitive – TokBox is special because you don’t need to use a client, as you do with competitors like Skype or chat networks like AIM and MSN. The release of a desktop client pits TokBox even more directly against these massive networks, and makes it clear that the company isn’t satisfied with just solving a problem (easy browser-based video chat) – they’re looking to take on the big guns.

The new client’s no-hassle setup and universal compatibility make it a strong addition to TokBox’s quickly expanding offerings, which include a recently launched Firefox extension that integrates with Facebook Chat, and integration with Meebo.

It’s slow this weekend so let’s offer a bit of service “journalism” by pointing you all to Snackr, an Adobe AIR-based RSS reader that pulls stories from your feed list or pre-made OPML file and displays them in a running ticker along your desktop. It works in OS X and Windows.

I’m a NewsFire man myself, but I’ve been looking for a good, unobtrusive RSS ticker for a while now so I’m glad to find Snackr. Sadly, the icon – an RSS feed icon with a bite taken out of it – makes me think the application is broken whenever I look at my task bar, wasting valuable brain cycles until I realize the author, Narciso Jaramillo, is just being funny and ironic.

It’s slow this weekend so let’s offer a bit of service “journalism” by pointing you all to Snackr, an Adobe AIR-based RSS reader that pulls stories from your feed list or pre-made OPML file and displays them in random ticker along your desktop. It works in OS X and Windows.

I’m a NewsFire man myself, but I’ve been looking for a good, unobtrusive RSS ticker for a while now so I’m glad to find Snackr. Sadly, the icon – an RSS feed icon with a bite taken out of it – makes me think the application is broken whenever I look at my task bar, wasting valuable brain cycles until I realize the author, Narciso Jaramillo, is just being funny and ironic.

Lest you all think I’m a nefarious, profit-hating music pirate , I bring word of Beatport’s latest innovation in online music distribution. The music site has developed an Adobe AIR download client that brings the fun of clicking “download now” from your Web browser to a stand-alone program. (If you use twhirl, and follow our sorry lot on Twitter , then you already have AIR installed.) Aside from allowing you to change the downloaded songs’ file-naming conventions (who doesn’t just re-tag everything in iTunes anyway?), there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to using the new AIR downloader other than novelty. But what a novelty!

Adobe AIR is sorta what Java was supposed to be, a multi-platform development language. Something like that.

I just bought Couture’s “Afterglow (Tom Neville’s At Your Feet Vocal)” and everything went smoothly, aside for that fact that it cost $1.50 and no one in America listens to progressive house.

Look what I do now, buy music.

Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.

The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:

A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.

What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.

The new version fully supports HTML and Ajax, meaning Apollo applications can be created without using any Flash at all. They are also releasing an extension to Dreamweaver web development software.

Adobe is also now saying that AIR will be fully launched by end of year. Our previous coverage of Adobe AIR is here.

The Adobe AIR site is here.

Four of the ten finalists are Abode Apollo based applications, remarkable for a platform launched just over 2 months ago.

The four Apollo based finalists:

D’Lite is an Apollo application that utilizes Digg’s API to retrieve data, information, and processes. Features include pagination, favorites, network detection, and smart auto refresh.

Digg Watch is a tool that lets users browse Digg and grab information from stories, like who Dugg what stories and how many Diggs a story gets over time. A nifty tool in looking up user activity.

Mini Digg allows users to view stories and see the story activity. A story tracking feature allows users to save favorite stories for future tracking.

DiggGraphr is a desktop application that lets users browse Digg stories in treemaps. The application allows customization as well as choice of Digg Channel.

All four have individual appeal and are generally clever implementations of data pulled from Digg and generated under Apollo. Voting closes May 30.

The project was started last year by Alan Lewis of the eBay Developers Program, and eventually became an internal initiative for eBay after being demoed last year at Adobe MAX in Las Vegas. Ryan Stewart blogged the demo and Rob Abbott, a member of the San Dimas team, also has some coverage. San Dimas features a UI created by EffectiveUI and uses eBay’s API’s to make creating, and managing auctions easier and faster. Because it’s written in Apollo, the program can improve performance by cutting down on repetitive requests for data, caching it locally instead. The application will also feature real-time auction monitoring and allow sellers to add in pictures directly uploaded from webcams and cameras.

Today’s release is made on the backdrop of a continuing controversy between Microsoft’s new Silverlight and Adobe’s Apollo, outlined by the WSJ today. Microsoft has already effectively lost as an online video standard to Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight marks the begining of a new battle over web standards as the two companies fight over the tools that will shape the future of web applications.

There is a video demoing the application here.

image courtesy Rob Abbott

Although this is the official release of the SDK, many developers have been working with Apollo for quite some time. Ryan Stewart recently covered the some of the better Apollo demos from an event they put on last month. See more on the launch from his ZDNet blog.

Readers have noticed our recent infatuation with the Apollo platform. I honestly believe that entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC. Photos, music, email and many other everyday tasks make a lot of sense in a single environment that is both local and in the cloud simultaneously. There is going to be a lot of creativity coming off of this platform over the near term.

There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.

Virtual Ubiquity – Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.

Scrybe – Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.

yourminis – Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.

Intelisea – One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.

Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.

I’m at the Adobe Engage event with a bunch of other bloggers including David Berlind, Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble and The Universal Desktop. The big highlight so far has been Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch’s keynote covering Apollo (You can listen to recent a podcast interview with Kevin Lynch, Steve Gillmor and Michael Arrington here).

Having a lot of inquisitive bloggers in the room meant a lot of good questions as Kevin gave his presentation. Kevin talked about how widespread the Adobe Engagement Platform has become with 700 million PCs and 200 million devices. In describing Apollo’s place in the ecosystem, he showed a slide charting richness and reach. Up to now, Adobe has focused on cross platform web based experiences, but with Apollo they’re hoping to move into richer desktop experiences as well as richer mobile integration.

A lot of the basic information on Apollo has been covered pretty extensively, including here on TechCrunch, so I’ll focus on the things that got the most discussion amongst the bloggers here. Security, which has been a concern of a lot of people in the community, seemed secondary to this audience. There’s a lot of talk about whether Apollo is going to be used for spyware or malicious software, but at the end of the day, Adobe is of the opinion that users have final control over what’s installed on their machines. They’re making sure that Apollo can’t wreak havoc (it won’t be
able to write to or delete system folders and each Apollo application is sandboxed so that Apollo applications can’t steal data from other Apollo applications).

The installation experience for Apollo goes through the Flash Player, so it bypasses Microsoft’s controls which results in a better experience, and one that Adobe controls. Kevin showed how quickly and easily it is to install individual Apollo applications and it’s a pretty good user experience. The one thing that seems to disappoint people here is that there are no plans to allow Apollo to access native applications on the OS. Adobe wants the Apollo experience to maintain its cross platform portability and they are aiming to keep up with developer needs without opening up OS-specific possibilities. The other thing that is becoming clearer is how Apollo applications will store data. Kevin said right now they’re looking at XML-based storage along with the possibility of advanced file-system caching that developers could tie into via an API. That’s all doable by developers now, but they’re talking about making it easier.

There is a lot of excitement here about Apollo. There are concerns about how viable it and how people are actually going to use it. A persistent question for the presenters has been “how does Apollo help you” and the main answer seems to be file system access. There aren’t a lot of people pushing the boundaries.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Apollo is a cross-platform runtime that is still in pre alpha and allows developers to build applications for the desktop using web technologies including Flash, HTML and PDF. While Web 2.0 has prominently declared the desktop dead, its demise has been greatly exaggerated which is why I implore you to take a look at Apollo. Mike did an interview with Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch about Apollo over on TalkCrunch and I recently interviewed Mike Downey, the Sr. Product Manager for Apollo. I also interviewed Kevin Lynch himself about Apollo earlier this year.

The reason Apollo is so important is because it changes the rules of the game. It is taking the technologies and tenants of the web and bringing them to the desktop. Apollo is cross platform and gives web developers access to things like the file system and close integration with the operating system in a set of APIs that are the same whether you’re writing in JavaScript or ActionScript. The web fostered an explosion in the creativity of application development and Apollo will undoubtedly do the same for desktop development.

So as entrepreneurs and developers, you need to be aware of the potential impact of Apollo. The desktop will see the same creative infusion that the web once did, but with more features and with the web’s most ubiquitous display formats (HTML, Flash and PDF). Early adopters to the platform have the potential to reap a bonanza and bring about the gold-rush like mentality that swept the web. Is someone going to figure out how to serve AdWords on the desktop with Apollo’s online/offline capabilities? Is it a new way to deliver rich media? A killer solution for email that spans web and desktop and integrates IM or VoIP? A new way to tie customers back to online properties? Desktop development is now going to be as open as web development was and the entrepreneurial spirit is going to bring about some fantastic innovation that blends the best of the web and the best of the desktop. That’s something that end users and startups alike will benefit from.

Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop. We hope to have him back regularly to review new Adobe Apollo applications.

Apollo will be useful for running desktop versions of critical web applications like email and calendaring, where offline access and application speed is sometimes important. Potential developers are already taking notice: eBay is working on a project called “San Dimas” to run on Apollo, although there are no announced plans to release it yet.

We’re excited about Apollo because it has the potential to be the launchpad for entirely new classes of startups. It could be the technology to watch for 2007. And Adobe is certainly counting on it to drive future revenue.

I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s senior vice president and chief software architect, about the upcoming launch of Apollo. Steve Gillmor joined me as well. Listen to the 37 minute podcast over on TalkCrunch, and let us know what you think Apollo’s “killer app” might be.

Screenshots below.