While Microsoft is kept busy trying to grab market from Adobe's Flash, the San Jose based company is not sitting duck for a second either. Adobe announced today the availability of its AIR platform (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and the Adobe Flex 3 software, both meant to aid the development of rich Internet applications that can extend onto your desktop.

A perfect example of this is the pownce desktop application, which works seamlessly as a desktop application although at its very core, it's a web-based service. Wikipedia identifies as AIR competitors, Microsoft's XAML (part of the Windows Presentation Foundation), Sun's JavaFX, and Mozilla's Prism, that was announced late last year.