New Releases: Adobe AIR 2 Beta / Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease

Adobe announced the beta release of AIR 2.0, the next iteration of the AIR platform.

New Adobe AIR 2.0 beta features include:

- Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
- Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
- Support for native code integration.
- The ability to open a file with its default application.
- Multi-touch and gesture support.
- New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
- Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
- Global error handling.
- Improved cross-platform printing
- Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Also, Linux users will be glad to know that Adobe AIR 2 now also comes in .deb and .rpm packages. Unfortunately, 64bit native packages are still not available.

For a complete list of release notes, see THIS page | Get Adobe AIR 2.0

Adobe also released Flash Player 10.1 which includes hardware decoding of H.264 video on Windows PCs, netbooks and mobile devices (among others).

Get Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease

[via techcrunch]