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.

Translation Identifiers
You can now have Designer add XLIFF identifiers to make it easier to translate the text in a form. Given that Designer forms can be saved in the XML based XDP format, you can open up the file after its designed to translate.

New locales
This one probably wont affect too many people I know but there is new support for Catalan, Basque & Tagalog

Paste options into lists
If you have data for a drop down list somewhere and you dont want to retype it you can now simply cut and paste!

Action Builder
I saved the best till last… over the last 5 years working with form designers one common feedback I get from many is that javascript is still too hard. The Designer team have come to the rescue with the new Action Builder, a wizard that allows you to add functionality that in the past would have required at least one line of code. Simply follow the wizard to perform tasks like showing / hiding a section, adding a new instance of a form, opening a web site and so on.

All up there is plenty for LiveCycle Designer users to get excited about, as well as less barriers for newcomers to the tool to start taking advantage of advanced features. Acrobat Pro users can look forward to an upgrade option as well, so sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES and provide feedback today!

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.

Workbench

The next release of LiveCycle ES continues to  strengthen the integration with the Flash Platform. The ability to build Flex based applications that are powered by LiveCycle ES is dramatically improved. The next release introduces many steps towards a seamless integration of the two technologies.

Workbench also has some dramatic improvements, all in the name of rapid productivity. First of all a lot of work has gone into streamlining process creation and automating a lot of the tasks that you would previously have to do in the Administration UI, such as Endpoint definition. The processes are now rendered using Flash, and there are any new icons to allow you to quickly get your processes built. Process components have been simplified and some offer “basic mode” which require only the mandatory parameters to be entered.

Oh and opening a form in Designer spawns it in a separate window. Great if you are screen real estate challenged. Also related to Forms, the Guide Builder plug in has been pulled out of Designer and made into a native Workbench perspective.

Is that it?  Of course not, but i’m on holidays so you’ll have to wait till I get a chance to write up a more thorough overview… you can of course sign up to download the beta at https://prerelease.adobe.com/callout/default.html?callid=1B618CFC5C9A43E3BA8C791FB4EF3291