This morning I was confronted with an email telling me about Adobe’s new release of Acrobat 9 reader.

Whoop-de-doo I hear you cry…and that’s exactly what I thought (I don’t really care much for PDF). However, I duly went to the download site and noticed a couple of small interesting things. Let me show you Exhibit’s A & B:

Both of these options were presented to me when I went to download. This is a signicant thing. Adobe are now using the pure ubquity of the reader software to distribute the AIR runtime. This means that the installations of AIR and Flash 9 are going to be going through the roof, which is a good thing as it now means that, for us AIR developers, relying on the client user having the runtime installed is a little easier to predict and handle.

Flash and PDF Reader have got to be the most installed items of software Adobe have in their arsenal. Overtime it certainly looks like AIR will be up there with them.