After the two big keynotes at the Adobe MAX North America conference this week, it’s time to summarize the "news" that our team has reported back from the show floor. It seems this year that the majority of the focus for Adobe was on the progression of its existing technologies, rather than on anything new and groundbreaking.

Adobe’s "Thermo" technology that was announced last year at MAX was given a new name and was moved from a pre-release to an early beta. The new product name is Adobe Flash Catalyst. This technology is designed to better integrate the design and development process for rich Internet applications (RIAs) and allow designers to take on more of the user experience design than they could previously. MAX attendees were given an early release, with the promise of a public beta by early 2009.

Adobe also released version 1.5 of Adobe AIR. This version supports encrypted local databases, support for Flash Player 10, and support for webkit and SquirrelFish for fast Javascript execution. In addition to the release, Adobe also shared some install numbers for AIR, announcing that it is on track to hit 100 million installs just one year after its release.

Also moving from pre-release to beta is CoCoMo, a framework that allows developers to easily add collaboration to any Flex application. The framework includes a few basic components like video chat, text chat and whiteboards, and allows developers to leverage hooks to build their own real-time collaborative applications.

Adobe Flash Player has also been given a facelift and now has a completely new text engine that supports multilingual text, including right to left languages like Arabic. In addition, Adobe announced its commitment to deliver the full Flash Player experience on high-end mobile devices, including the new Google Android phones. Adobe also alluded to the fact that it is working toward Flash support for the iPhone, which we all knew would come eventually.