He showed Flash Player running on phones that use the Symbian and Windows Mobile OSes; on a Mobile Internet Device based on Intel's Atom processor; and on T-Mobile's G1 phone, which uses Google's Android software. Adobe is also working on a Flash Player for the iPhone, but it's still waiting for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to approve its use on the device, Lynch said. Adobe made a deal with chip design company Arm to bring Flash Player to Arm's processors, which are used in many devices including the iPhone.

Lynch announced that the Major League Baseball organization will start streaming games using its Flash software next season. He said it was a win over Microsoft, which last year touted the MLB as one of the first big users of its competing Silverlight technology.

While Flash Player is geared toward Web applications and video content, Adobe is pushing the Adobe Runtime Environment, or AIR, for applications that run offline on the desktop. AIR 1.5, released Monday, includes a new text-rendering engine that The New York Times has used to develop a news reader for its International Herald Tribune publication.

Michael Zimbalist, the Times' vice president for research and development, showed how the reader allows people to flip through pages using the right and left arrow keys of their keyboards instead of following hyperlinks. It can reformat pages automatically for different sized screens, including wrapping text around images and inserting hyphens for line breaks. The reader is expected later this year for the Herald Tribune; Zimbalist didn't say if one would be offered for The New York Times.

Adobe is also making a greater push in the enterprise, Lynch said. Salesforce.com Executive Vice President Steve Fisher joined him on stage to urge developers here to use Flex and AIR to build better front ends for applications on Salesforce.com's hosted platform.

"For the last 20 years, enterprise software has been where innovation has gone to die," Fisher proclaimed, telling developers they should get more creative.

The announcements Monday see Adobe expanding into new areas even as it battles an expected slowdown in its business amid the impending recession.

"Clearly we do see we're in a financial crisis, and this will have a short-term impact on Adobe's business," Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen told reporters after Lynch's speech. The company is limiting new hires "dramatically," although it is still adding some staff, added CFO Mark Garrett.

But both executives argued that Adobe will be a stronger company in the long term if it builds a more diverse business now.