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Adobe’s AIR platform has been a major boon to bringing Internet applications to the desktop across all of the major operating systems. TweetDeck, Seesmic, and an array of other popular social apps run on the platform.

While AIR has been around since 2007, it’s never received an update like this one. Today, Adobe announced the beta release of AIR 2.0, the next iteration of the AIR platform.

AIR 2.0 beta offers a lot of new features, most of them ones that users won’t notice such as improved IPv6 support and global error handling. However, it does boast some new functionality for users, most notably multi-touch and gesture support, which could make it useful for use on something like the fabled Apple Tablet or a touchscreen PC.

Here is a list of AIR 2’s new features, as provided by Adobe:

- Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
- Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
- Support for native code integration.
- The ability to open a file with its default application.
- Multi-touch and gesture support.
- New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
- Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
- Global error handling.
- Improved cross-platform printing
- Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Remember, this is a beta, meaning that it will come with bugs and errors as the company improves the software. If that doesn’t scare you off though, you can download AIR 2.0 here.