Adobe recently released the Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile client for iPhone, allowing you easy access to Connect meeting rooms while on the go. This is the fourth iPhone app released by Adobe, with iPhone clients for Photoshop.com, Acrobat.com & LiveCycle ES already in the wild.

With this release you can connect to a meeting room, view the camera pod, view content shared from other peoples screens, and even participate in a two way chat in real time.

Since this app was built with the upcoming version of Flash Professional that has support for building iPhone apps with Flash, the same app should soon appear on other smart phones as well!

In the last two weeks I’ve been able to attend a meeting from my lounge at home, on the side of the road (don’t use Connect Pro and drive!) and have even joined a meeting in Connect Pro while being in another meeting! How’s that for efficiency!

You can read more about this release and watch a video at the Acrobat Connect Pro User Community website

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile can now be downloaded from the iTunes store.  You can download it from Apple’s app store here:  http://itunes.com/apps/AdobeAcrobatConnectProMobile

At the recent MAX conference Adobe announced that it was working on new versions of both Flash Player & Adobe AIR. These new updates are now available in prerelease format to allow developers to download and test the new enhancements.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent browser runtime release of the Open Screen Project that will enable uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across the desktop and devices.

Apart from being the first release to target non PC devices like mobile phones, its faster. A LOT faster!

Adobe AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1.0, allowing developers to create more reliable and feature-rich applications in the desktop context, and they can easily add AIR 2 functionality to update current AIR 1.0 applications. New AIR 2 features include enhanced support for mass storage devices and native application processes, as well as peer-to-peer and UDP networking.

Watch Kevin Lynch at MAX talk about AIR 2.0.

Download both the Flash Player & AIR 2 prerelease betas at labs.adobe.com

Adobe’s Ben Forta visited Australia this week and I had the pleasure of joining him in the ZDNet studios in Sydney. Below is the video interview that was filmed with Chris Duckett. Ben talks about ColdFusion, the Flash Platform and a whole bunch of other interesting things!

Australian journalist Brad Howarth recently interviewed me regarding my opinions on what Adobe is doing with Flash and has included my comments in an unbiased article recently published in February 20th B&T magazine.

Apart from choosing the technology that can get your message to as many people as possible, one key takeaway from the article is the importance of understanding the workflow between your developer and designers. This is especially important now that the demand for a great user experience is important.

Having creative people burn cycles slicing and dicing their artwork for developers is time consuming and costly. Developers cannot afford to ignore the user experience as there audience expect higher engagement and “that will do” is no longer an option. In fact, many projects are now start with a “front to back” approach (designing the user experience first then wiring it up behind) rather than the traditional “back to front” method which leaves the user interface as a final consideration.

Adobe has put an amazing amount of effort into the latest release of Creative Suite, CS4, that specifically targets these designer / developer workflows. New functionality such as being able to move from Photoshop to Fireworks to CSS compliant HTML in Dreamweaver are easier than ever before. Improvements such as Subversion support in Dreamweaver makes it even easier to sit alongside a dev project.

If you add to this that Flash is no longer constrained to a web browser and can be included in a desktop application (Adobe AIR) or inside a PDF (Acrobat 9) then all of a sudden your creative efforts have been leveraged across many different mediums.

While you can implement the new workflow improvements today, what many of you are waiting on anxiously is Flash Catalyst (previously codenamed Thermo). Catalyst will tighten the designer / developer workflow even more allowing true round tripping between tools.

While I intend to write a whole lot more about this, you can see a snippet of information held in the slides and samples from the recent Refresh event.

You can also read Brad’s full article by downloading the RTF files in Brad’s latest blog post. or purchasing the print edition as I did.

Over the last few weeks Andrew Spaulding & I met up with a handful of Australian Web Developers and Designers in both Sydney & Melbourne. I put together this video on what they do, their opinions of Adobe technology and what they think about the Australian community and its potential.

Featured in the video are
Robin Hilliard from Rocket Boots, Todd Trevillion from Gruden, freelancer Andrew Muller, Andrew Apostola from Portable Content, Glen Peterson of Cummins Nitro and
Chris Maisano from Citrus

There is a lot of great work happening out there and its good to see such a vibrant selection of talent. We’ll be doing more interviews over the next few months so if you’d like to show off what you do let me know!

I’m really pumped! Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, lead by Adobe and supported by technology leaders such as Cisco, Intel, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba etc and content providers like MTV, NBC, BBC and more.

We drag around our devices with us every day, and these little things (media players, mobile phones etc) come out partying with us, sit in airport terminals with us, even sit at a lonely dinner table with us when travelling. So why is the experience on these devices not as good as the heavy laptops we carry around?

The good news is that its about to change. Adobe is lifting the restrictions on the use of the SWF & FLV file formats. This means that device manufacturers can easily embed Flash content designed by designers, not just coded by developers into their new products, leading to a great user experience!

We’ve seen some great examples of whats possible already.. iRiver have used Flash as the UI for their media players for some time, Flash comes with both the Sony PSP & PS3, and some mobile manufacturers are building the entire phone UI in Flash!

This is really big and I’m sure we’ll be talking about this for some time!