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 recently announced that you can sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES, and within that is the newest version of LiveCycle Designer. Here is a look at what is new for form designers;

Default Scripting Language for all forms
Ok, so you could sort of do this by making your own templates, but its a nice start.

Form Validation control
This one is cool, you can now specify at a form level how validation messages are displayed to the user, controlling things like how message boxes appear, colouring madatory fields, colour the border or background of fields that fail validation and set focus to the first item that fails. Continue Reading

In case you haven’t yet heard, this week Adobe announced the beta availabily for the next version of LiveCycle ES. If you haven’t had time to download and test the new beta but are still curious about what changes are being worked on for the next release? Here is a quick look at some areas of this release;

Installer

The installation experience is mostly the same, except for a few tweaks. First off you will notice that you are no longer prompted for a serial number during the install. LiveCycle will now always install in evaluation mode and remain that way until you enter a serial number via the admin screens. This will be welcome news to many users! Another great thing is that the turnkey installs the Java JDK, which is still a challenge for some trial customers who are unfamiliar with Java. There is also a “flexible turnkey” which I haven’t yet tried but it looks like you will be able to change some of the default turnkey paths & more which will be very welcome. The final thing about the new installer is that you can elect to have it configure SSL encryption for your turnkey installation, making it easier for you to test out components. Continue Reading