Michael Hu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Adobe AIR, as just noted that today is AIR's 2nd birthday!

Check out the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 mobile preview videos showing off Flash (on the HTC HD2 and Nexus One, Dell Mini 5 tablet, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid) and AIR (on NVIDIA Tegra-powered tablet, and Droid).

We've been talking about using Flash to build apps for devices for some time now. And the AIR team has just posted a some details on doing just this in a preview of AIR on Android.

I visited China several times last year, and am planning multiple trips this year, too. China is home to the second largest population of Flash and Flex developers, and it's high time those developers had the opportunity to take part in a full-blown Flash Platform conference of their own. So I am excited that we're hosting a 2-day Adobe Flash Platform Summit, a mini-MAX of sorts, in Beijing on April 21st - 22nd, 2010. The exact agenda and speaker list is still being worked out, but I do plan on attending, and am really looking forward to the event!

WorkflowLab is a new AIR based application that provides an easy way to learn about, track and share workflow best practices. It provides designers, developers and project managers with a common way to learn, build, annotate, share and track workflows for designing and developing projects. WorkflowLab includes a number of workflow starting points and enables users to easily share and track workflows. WorkflowLab is currently in development and a beta build is available for download from Adobe Labs.

JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA has long been a top notch Java IDE (and has long been the tool of choice for many on the ColdFusion engineering team). But IntelliJ IDEA does more than just Java, and the new version 9 improves its Flex and AIR support, too.

Title says it all, Adobe AIR 1.5.3 has been released. See the release notes for details.

MAX 2009 attendees were treated to a sneak preview of Avatar (which is due in theaters worldwide on December 18th, 2009). And now the Avatar AIR desktop application is available for you to download! CNET calls the app a must-see, and I agree!

A few weeks ago I mentioned ChessJam, a Flex/AIR/ColdFusion/LCDS app built by Greg Wilson and some of his pals. Greg has since posted technical details on how the app works. (He actually posted this last week, but I missed it while on the road).

Title says it all. AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 are now both live on Adobe Labs.

AIR 2 adds support for the detection of storage volume mounting (for example, when your digital camera is plugged in). Kevin Lynch demoed this functionality at MAX last month, and now Christian Cantrell has posted a demonstration that shows how this all works.

Fellow platform evangelist Miti Pricope has spent a considerable amount of time working on how to integrate PayPal Express Checkout with Flex applications running in Flash Player or in Adobe AIR. He has posted his thoughts and recommendations in a new ADC article entitled Integrating PayPal Express Checkout with Flex and Adobe AIR.

Fellow Adobe platform evangelist Greg Wilson has posted some details about ChessJam, a new multi-user chess game he helped create. The client is a Flex based AIR application, and the back-end is a mixture of ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services. He has promised to post a follow-up entry with details of the technical underpinnings.

The new and greatly improved Adobe Cookbooks is now online. New features include:

• Many more products/technologies
• Improved navigation and search
• Recipe requests - for developers who can't find the code sample they are looking for
• Related recipes - that appear in a side bar of all recipe pages
• Cookbook Explorer - a visual display of top cookbook recipes and contributors
• New contributor recognition features - profile pics, links to blogs, links to community profiles

Squiggly is a spell checker library for use with any text control in Flash and AIR applications. This is something lots of users have wanted for a long time, and Squiggly is now available to play with on Adobe Labs. This initial release is intended for use with English language dictionaries, but the plan is to support additional languages in the future.

BlazeDS is LiveCycle Data Services' little brother, our free open-source server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Flex and AIR applications.

If you use BlazeDS, then take a look at BlazeMonster, a little app that generates Flex code to consume BlazeDS Remoting services, and also generates configuration files to expose Java classes as Remoting services. BlazeMonster was built by fellow Adobe evangelist Sujit Reddy G.

MLB OnBase keeps you up to date with Major League Baseball. Stay up-to-date on the latest baseball buzz with news delivered from MLB.com as well as tweets from fellow fans, right to your computer desktop! With MLB.com OnBase, it's easy to know when exciting events are taking place, or when there is high activity around a player, team, or topic.

U.K. based Speed-Trap has announced that its analytics software now supports Adobe AIR applications allowing you to capture and process detailed data on users' application interactions.

With ColdFusion 9 in public beta, we're dedicating quite a few MAX 2009 sessions to the subject this year. Here are some CF9 sessions that you should be aware of:

• ColdFusion Product Manager Adam Lehman is presenting a high-level What's New In ColdFusion 9 session.
• ColdFusion Engineering Manager Hemant Khandelwal presents a detailed look at ColdFusion 9's internals (and focuses on lots of lesser known goodies) in An Insider's Guide to ColdFusion 9. Hemant presented a version of this one at CFUnited recently, and it was one of the most popular and best attended sessions there.
• Adobe Platform Evangelist Terry Ryan is presenting a session on using ColdFusion with Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Exchange.
• ColdFusion Jedi Master Ray Camden is presenting an Introduction to ColdFusion ORM, and ColdFusion engineering team member Rupesh Kumar is presenting a follow-on session on Advanced ColdFusion ORM. Adam Lehman is also teaching a hands-on lab on the subject entitled Hands-On ORM with ColdFusion 9. Yep, three sessions on this one, it's that important.
• ColdFusion engineering team member Rakshith Naresh covers ColdFusion 9's new AIR integration (including the online/offline support) in Building Offline Applications with ColdFusion 9 and Adobe AIR. Simon Slooten also covers this important topic in his hands-on lab Taking ColdFusion Apps Offline with Adobe AIR.
• Rob Brooks-Bilson explains the new ColdFusion 9 caching options in Advanced ColdFusion Caching Strategies.
• Terry Ryan explains ColdFusion's new exposed services layer in Leveraging Exposed Services in ColdFusion 9.
• Pete Freitag will discuss the new portal integration options in his session Building JEE Portlets with ColdFusion.
• ColdFusion engineering team member Praveen Gupta will cover upgrading to ColdFusion 9, as well as the new ColdFusion 9 server management features in Managing, Monitoring, and Upgrading Your ColdFusion Servers.

Oh, and by the way, MAX 2009 discounted early bird pricing closes in 11 days! (And if you need one of those discount codes I mentioned previously, I snagged a few more and have a handful left).

The Ext team has announced the release of Ext JS 3.0, and has also released a Designer Preview tool built using Adobe AIR. Good stuff!

Scotch On The Rocks Europe is now officially a go, and registration is now open. Locations are:

• October 19: Munich
• October 21: Zurich
• October 23: Milan
• October 26: Amsterdam
• October 27: Brussels
• October 29: London

The AIR team has announced the release of AIR 1.5.2. Changes and fixes are listed in the release notes.

I am in Washington Dulles airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Paris, and then on to Bangalore, India. This is my 4th trip to Bangalore, and this time I'll be meeting up with fellow platform evangelist Serge Jespers for several days of meetings with customers, partners, and press, and a full day 1000 attendee event Adobe DevSummit (which still has a few spaces left, if you have not signed up yet).

RIA Unleashed Boston is New England's only conference focused on building rich internet applications using the Adobe Flash Platform including Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Catalyst and more. RIA Unleashed is built on top of the former Flex Camp Boston events run the past two years. The event will be held at Bentley University in Waltham, MA, on November 13th, 2009, from 8:00am to 5:30pm.