You can also look at Michael Chaize's event photo album on Flickr!

Volumes monitoring

AIR will provide new APIs to monitor volumes such as USB sticks or Firewire hard drives. Those APIs will enable the user to listen for specific events dispatched when a volume is mounted/unmounted.

Native-processes handling

A new API will enable access to native processes. It will now be possible to launch any "classic" third-party application using ActionScript 3 only. The only drawback being that such AIR applications loses their cross-platform ability and can not be deployed using standards *.air files.

Another API makes it possible to open a file using the default application. A *.txt file would them open itself in notepad, a *.psd file inside Photoshop, a path will open the explorer, etc... and this feature will be available inside any AIR application!

Direct microphone data access

And this is the feature a lot of people have been waiting for! Microphone data will now be directly available through dedicated events and a ByteArray object. It will work pretty much the same way sockets/loaders do: each time sound data is received by the microphone, an event will be fired with the embed sound data as a ByteArray object. It is then very easy to manipulate this sound data or even save it to a *.wav file.

Click the photo to view the full video on Lee Brimelow's "The Flash Blog"

Thank you very much Mike and Lee for all those great news! I bet MAX will be even bigger.