While Flash Player is geared toward Web applications and video content, Adobe is pushing the Adobe Runtime Environment, or AIR, for applications that run offline on the desktop. AIR 1.5, released Monday, includes a new text-rendering engine that The New York Times has used to develop a news reader for its International Herald Tribune publication.

Michael Zimbalist, the Times' vice president for research and development, showed how the reader allows people to flip through pages using the right and left arrow keys of their keyboards instead of following hyperlinks. It can reformat pages automatically for different sized screens, including wrapping text around images and inserting hyphens for line breaks. The reader is expected later this year for the Herald Tribune; Zimbalist didn't say if one would be offered for The New York Times.

Adobe is also making a greater push in the enterprise, Lynch said. Salesforce.com Executive Vice President Steve Fisher joined him on stage to urge developers here to use Flex and AIR to build better front ends for applications on Salesforce.com's hosted platform.

"For the last 20 years, enterprise software has been where innovation has gone to die," Fisher proclaimed, telling developers they should get more creative.

The announcements Monday see Adobe expanding into new areas even as it battles an expected slowdown in its business amid the impending recession.