First big announcement is that there’s a new emphasis on the Flash Platform – as originally called by Macromedia in 2005. Flash, Flex, AIR, and Thermo are just tools to develop experiences using the Flash Runtime, and apparently all these names are just confusing people. Adobe decided to consolidate everything into one platform and market it accordingly. Thermo was officially renamed to Flash Catalyst, and for those of you not familiar with Thermo, it’s a new tool still on early stages of development, targeted to designers or more specifically interactive designers, and allows them to convert a PSD or AI file into a RIA with all events, motions, states, animations, and data… and the best part is that it generates mxml and as3 code so a developer can extend and continue the development using Flex Builder.

Next they announced AIR 1.5, which ships now with Flash 10 adding the new text engine, pixel blender, 3d capabilities to the desktop. They demo’d a New York Times app that dynamically renders text in multiple column layouts adapting to any screen resolution. AIR 1.5 also ships with the latest version on WebKit and squirrelfish, making all JavaScript executions at least 50% faster than the previous build.

Following, they showed a few demos of Flash 10 capabilities, which I’ve seen before, just as an audio mixer, 3d audio visualization, pixel blender effects on real time videos… Which preceded the announcement that MLB now uses Flash to stream all their games, completing a sports monopoly of the NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA, … As part of how AIR is being used nowadays, Adobe invited Maria Shriver to talk about the California Museum applications. I found that a poor choice, mostly before most attendees are from out of town, don’t know Maria, and even the locals, don’t really seem to care.

Kevin Lynch mentioned that they are targeting 100MM AIR installs after just one year, thought they’re a little far, having now about 25MM.

An Adobe engineer demo’d Tour de Flex, a demo app with component browsing, code, examples, and over 200 API implementations with full source code… amazing piece of application, useful for every Flex developer for sure (http://flex.org/tour )

Nigel Pegg takes the stage and talks about Cocomo, which was introduced last year. Cocomo is social applications with Flex using Flex components and API hosted by Adobe hosted services. It pretty much allows you to build Adobe ConnectNow with Flex components, and it’s available today at Adobe Labs. Kevin then announced Adobe Wave, a social notification service in your desktop… so the idea is that it hooks up to every social network and aggregates all notifications. Although I see the value as teen agers stopped using email and rely mainly in social networks messaging, I don’t see why Adobe had to build this… doesn’t really belong.

Main announcement of the night, Kevin shows and demo’d a full Flash Player 10 install on multiple phones such as Nokia, Samsung, the Android G1, and even the iPhone. Lynch was browsing full Flash sites, youtube, video, audio, and all from a mobile phone running a full unmodified flash site.

For full Adobe coverage check out http://adobe.com/go/keynote