At its MAX 2009 conference in Los Angeles this week, Adobe unveiled the major new features of its upcoming AIR 2.0 desktop runtime. AIR has been in use on millions of desktops, according to the company, and developers wanted the runtime to support more capabilities for desktop rich-client applications.

An often requested feature, for instance, was the ability to interact with native OS processes, such as starting and stopping other applications on the host OS. That feature is now among those planned for AIR 2.0. In a recent blog post, Adobe's Rob Christensen enumerates the new features developers might be most interested in:

• Native process API:

  [It] will enable applications to invoke and communicate with native applications on the local machine. In order to preserve the cross platform nature of the .air file format, applications that take advantage of the native process API must be deployed as native installers such as .exe and .dmg. The AIR runtime SDK will include support for generating basic native installers.

• Detected mass storage device support:

  An AIR 2 application can listen for when a user plugs in a Flip video camera or USB Flash drive so that it can, for example, automatically synchronize files to the local system or prompt the user to upload photos to Facebook or videos to YouTube.

• Local microphone access API:

  Using the upcoming AIR 2 local microphone API, it will be possible to record audio locally, which can be important if your application is running in a disconnected mode.

• Improved sockets:

  It will now be possible to create local servers and lightweight P2P applications with enhancements to AIR's socket support.

Support for multitouch and gestures on new operating systems, better accessibility, an open document API, and a faster WebKit will also be part of AIR 2.0.

What do you think of the planned new AIR 2.0 features? What new features would you like to see in AIR 2.0?