Eric Natzke is one of the leading interactive artist of our day so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that he’s using AIR to help him make his creative visions come to life. Eric’s been working on a project with AIR and CS3 in which he takes photographs and creates very cool surreal artwork based on them. Using the colors from the image and a series of concentric circles, he creates a very cool looking version of the original photograph.

He describes his process a bit in the comments of this Flickr photo but he essentially manipulates the photo in Flash CS3. He then uses AIR to export those as PNGs. Because it’s all dynamic and he’s making sure he has super-high res (400 megs) AIR lets him get all of his artwork out of Flash. He then combines them using Photoshop. Very, very cool use of CS3 and AIR together. I want him to do some of my photos.

Mozilla announced Prism on their labs site today, a re-branded version of WebRunner that helps take your browser applications to the desktop. It has some important differences from Adobe AIR but there are also a lot of interesting similarities that prove people are interested in bringing the web to the desktop.

The differences mostly lie in the way the two runtimes come at the same problem. Prism is basically taking existing web applications and giving them a desktop feel with things like their own window, a place on the system tray/start menu, and a pretty easy way to turn any web site into a desktop application. AIR on the other hand is more desktop centric. In addition to all the branding aspects of having an app on the desktop you also get some important functionality such as access to the file system, the ability to associate files with your AIR application and a standard install/uninstall process.

What’s cool is that both Adobe AIR and Prism will let you take your existing application and port it to the desktop with little or no code changes. They also both use HTML and JavaScript. Prism obviously uses Firefox’s HTML rendering engine, while Adobe AIR uses WebKit. So with both runtimes you can take any Ajax application out there today and turn it into a desktop application. Depending on the feature set and experience you’re looking for you can choose what delivery mechanism is best for you.

Along with the recent Flex Builder 3 public beta 2 release Adobe recently announcing the new packaging and pricing for Flex Builder 3.

Adobe Flex™ Builder™ 3 Standard Edition - $249
Adobe Flex™ Builder™ 3 Professional Edition $699

Flex Builder 3 Professional Edition adds the following feature:

• Data visualization and charting components
• Memory and performance profilers
• Flex test automation framework

Upgrade Pricing:

• Flex Builder 2 to Flex Builder 3 Standard Upgrade - $99 US
• Flex Builder 2 with Charting to Flex Builder 3 Professional Upgrade - $299 US
• Trade-up from FB Standard to FB Professional - $499 US

New Flex Builder 2 Pricing

Starting on November 1, 2007, Adobe will be re-pricing Flex Builder 2 to align with the new Flex Builder 3 pricing, so you will be able to purchase Flex Builder 2 for only $249 US and Flex Builder 2 with Charting for only $699 US.

Mike Chambers went through and encoded all of the videos over on the tour Video Blog into mp4 so that you can watch them on your iPod Touch or iPhone. In addition, he’s modified the video feed so that it includes both the new mp4 format as well as the FLV files so you can subscribe in either iTunes or Adobe Media Player (AMP) that we released at MAX.

We’ve got a bunch of the sessions from the tour up there as well as a number of other interesting videos about AIR. After we finish up with MAX Europe and MAX Tokyo I think we’re going to be putting more content up including interviews with people at Adobe and other info about AIR and Flex. It’s worth checking out especially now that you can do it while you’re on the go.

We released a ton of news this morning that has gotten a lot of pickup on Techmeme. Part of the news is that beta 2 of AIR is now available on our site. Beta 2 includes a bunch of bug fixes as well as some new functionality. We’re getting closer to the launch and we can’t wait to get your feedback on this new version. Along with the second beta of AIR we’ve finally released Adobe Media player as well!

[tags]Adobe, AIR[/tags]