Adobe announces hardware accelerated video in Flash, Apollo's new name, and two new betas

We're announcing a whole lot of things today at Adobe so I wanted to give an overview of some of my favorite parts of the news and what it means for people. I'm going to be on a plane when this goes live, so I'll link up other sources as soon as I land.

Update: The news seems to have been well recieved. Scoble chimed with an interesting take, Read/Write Web had solid analysis, TechCrunch posted, and Mashable did as well.

Hardware Accelerated video in the Flash Player We're releasing a small update to Flash Player 9 that takes advantage of your Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) when you're watching video in full screen. As far as I know, this is the first time the Flash Player has done any type of hardware acceleration, so it's a good first step. We've also gone through and optimized some parts of the On2 decoder so that the video will look crisper and perform better.

Introducing AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) - now with Ajax support

Apollo finally has it's name, AIR (download available here). Along with the new name, we're releasing a beta version of AIR which include much improved JavaScript/HTML support. You could do HTML before with the Alpha version, but with this beta release, HTML and JavaScript are first class citizens. You can build an AIR application entirely from HTML with no Flash at all. We're also releasing tools that should make it much easier to build Ajax AIR applications. You can download an extension for Dreamweaver which will package the .air file for you from your Dreamweaver code. We're also announcing support for the very powerful Aptana IDE. With this, you can use Aptana and get code completion for AIR APIs as well as the ability to create .air files right from Aptana.

Open Source Flex We announced the open sourcing of Flex earlier this year, but today we're releasing a beta of Flex 3 which has a number of enhancements and is also the first iteration of our open source initiative. With this beta we will be opening the bug base to everyone and start providing nightly builds for developers to download. It's not fully open source yet, but we're trying to move to that as fast as we can, so I think this is an important baby step in that process. Ted Patrick has been covering a lot of the new features in Flex 3 but some of my favorites are deep linking (the URLs now change in the address bar as you navigate around a Flex application making deep linking possible) and the new developer-designer workflow that makes it easy to go between the CS3 suite and Flex 3.

On Air Bus Tour

I saved the best for last. We're announcing the On Air bus tour which will be a massive 18 city road trip here in North America with events aimed at developers who want to build applications on AIR. At each stop you'll have a chance to talk with some of the team members, attend sessions on things like building Ajax-based AIR applications and the File System APIs. We'll also have night events where you can demo a project you've been working on in front of the crowd and do some networking with people in your city and on the bus.

The first leg of the tour starts on July 10th in Seattle. We'll have a live streaming camera on the bus at all times and GPS so you'll be able to track where we are and what we're up to. We've got a Twitter account for the tour, a Flickr group that you can join, and a blog that we'll be updating with information about the tour and reports from the event. Luckily we'll be putting our data cards to good use so there will be lots of blogging and I'll try not to miss a beat.