Adobe announced yesterday at Adobe MAX the advancements to the Adobe Flash Platform, a complete system of integrated tools, frameworks, clients and servers to develop Web apps, content and video that runs across various OS and devices.
Some of the highlights of this announce are the preview of Flash Catalyst( formely code named Thermo in Adobe Labs), a professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. Flash Catalyst enables artwork created in Adobe Creative Suite 4 to be imported with full fidelity and quickly converted into dynamic components such as buttons, scrollbars, input fields and more. Finished projects can be published directly to Flash Player or AIR. When combined with the next version of Flex Builder, Adobe Flash Catalyst enables design and development to be done in parallel. This workflow supports iterative development and delivers higher quality results with faster time to market. A preview release of Adobe Flash Catalyst will be available for MAX 2008 attendees. A public beta version is expected to be available on Adobe Labs in early 2009. For more information, please visit www.adobe.com/go/flashcatalyst.
The Flex Builder “Gumbo” preview release, also available yesterday for MAX 2008 attendees, expands the use of Flex to a wider audience of developers, offering new data-centric development capabilities to create rich Internet applications. Gumbo also enhances project productivity through the improved design and development workflow with Adobe Flash Catalyst and improvements to core development capabilities such as the debugger, profiler and code editor. For more information, please visit http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/. A new preview release of the open source Flex framework is also available on www.opensource.adobe.com.
Adobe AIR 1.5 is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac, and AIR 1.5 for Linux is expected to be available before the end of the year. For more information on Adobe AIR, please visit www.adobe.com/products/air/.
Furthering Adobe’s commitment to the Linux community and as part of ensuring the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, a pre-release 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10 is now available on Adobe Labs at www.adobe.com/go/linux64player.This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux systems and removes the need for 32-bit emulation.
UPDATE:
Here’s a link to Adobes Page for The Flash Platform
http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/
And an image shameless ripped form Keith Peters post on the subject 
![[Valid RSS]](http://www.cloudfaces.com/swfgeekblogexamples/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Adobe AIR 1.5
Adobe also announced today the availability of Adobe AIR 1.5, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, which enables Web developers to deliver rich Internet applications outside the browser. Offering new features and performance improvements to create more expressive AIR applications, Adobe AIR 1.5 incorporates the open source WebKit HTML engine and now accelerates application performance with “SquirrelFish,” the new WebKit JavaScript interpreter. Adobe AIR 1.5 also includes a new, encrypted database that meets enterprise security compliance requirements while storing data securely on customers’ computers. Additionally, AIR 1.5 includes functionality introduced in Adobe Flash Player 10, such as support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, and extensible rich text layout.
Adobe AIR 1.5 developer release notes
Adobe AIR 1.5 user release notes
Download Adobe AIR version 1.5
UPDATE:
A more detailed explanation by Robert Christensen in the Adobe AIR Team Blog on the post Introducing Adobe AIR 1.5