We’re doing the final leg of the on AIR Tour Europe in a couple of weeks and so far registration has been great and there are a couple of cities that are sold out but we still have slots in a few of them. If you’re interested in checking out AIR, talking to us about feature requests, and want a free copy of the AIR for JavaScript Developers pocket guide to take home, head over and register.

With today’s release of Flash Player 10, there are a ton of new features that will eventually be making their way into AIR. The tour is a great way to get a head start and chat with the teams about what you want to see in future versions of AIR. I’m also hoping to see some really cool Flash Player 10 demos from the community. Hopefully we can show some off on stage.

We just released a public version of AIR on Linux as well as the tooling in Flex Builder for Linux to create AIR applications. Adobe really wants to provide full support on Linux for our RIA technologies. We’d love to hear what you think so please submit feedback and help us make the Linux release really fantastic.

Yesterday on TechCrunch was a guest post by Matthew Gertner who works for Prism, a cool technology from Mozilla that lets you create desktop applications out of any website. Matthew does a pretty good job of laying out part of the scene but I think he misses an important point. Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) like Prism are similar but also very different from what AIR does which is let you create real desktop applications with web technologies.

The APIs for Prism are for the most part limited to providing the user a desktop icon, a separate memory instance, and something outside the typical browser chrome. These are all great because as Matthew says, sometimes you don’t want your application stuck between two tabs in the browser. But AIR goes beyond that by exposing a lot more of the OS APIs in the hopes of providing a very robust, cross-platform desktop environment.

With AIR you can go offline or leverage your own chrome just like Prism but you can also talk more closely with the file system. You can register your own file types, you get access to the file system, you can create new native windows, you can create your own native menus, you get access to the OS’ clip board and you can drag and drop data between applications. In an effort to bridge the web-desktop gap a bit you can also send data from your AIR application to the browser. Finetune does this when you have the desktop client open and select a playlist from the web interface. We want you to go out and create real desktop applications with Adobe AIR, not just the same application you’ve been creating inside of the browser. You can reuse a lot of that code, but you have a lot more functionality with AIR if you want to use it.

None of these technologies is stagnant, so it will be great to see it all evolve: WPF from Microsoft, Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and Prism. In the end it means there’s a lot more excitement around desktop applications. And I think most importantly, we can use the best platform for the job, we don’t have to be stuck inside of a browser if we don’t want to be.

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]

Earlier this week Scoble posted a video that he took while he was on the bus from San Francisco to Seattle. In the video he interviews us about Adobe AIR and he gets some footage of the inside of the bus. You also get to meet everyone who came with us which is kind of cool.