With the welcome release of Adobe AIR 2 in beta, revised APIs and additional classes and features provide end users with an enhanced experience, whilst still giving developers a simple but extremely powerful way to develop feature-rich desktop applications.

Once again FO have managed to comfortably pull up a chair and join the ranks of developers and contributors in another of the UK's top Development/Design publications, Web Designer magazine, exploring some of the new features available with the AIR 2 beta through the process of developing a small but powerful desktop app that will provide levels of functionality wrapped inside a useful file explorer application.

The tutorial will guide you through the steps to create a desktop app that interacts with the user's operating system to detect the addition or removal of external storage devices, and provides a clean, friendly method of browsing the local file structure and integrating with native applications.

Issue 166 is out today (January 14th) so make sure you pick up a copy and enjoy everything that AIR 2 has to offer.