Adobe has taken the wraps off of the final version of its Adobe AIR platform, which has been in beta for some time now. Adobe AIR is a platform that allows developers to create applications that access web services without the need for a web browser. For example, there's an Adobe AIR application that lets you manipulate Google Analytics data, another that lets you upload and organize files stored on AOL's Xdrive storage service, and a bunch of AIR clients for Twitter.

During the beta period, we've been pretty impressed with the look and feel of AIR applications that we've tried out. Now that there's a new release of AIR, users may be prompted to download the update in order to install newer applications, while some applications you've previously installed may be bound to older versions of AIR. Fortunately you can have multiple versions of AIR installed on your computer simultaneously.

AIR is available for Mac and Windows computers. You can find an incomplete list of applications built on Adobe AIR at Adobe's web site