Adobe AIR - Consitent Experience, but Inconsistent Runtime

Adobe AIR is one of the best solution for cross-platform development today. With the release of every new version there are good number of new features and decent performance improvements.

AIR 2.7 got huge performance boost on iOS platform, now you can develop games for iPad and other iDevices with 30+ FPS. That was the one mission accomplished. The Blackberry Tablet OS also has great support for AIR as it is integrated in the OS itself. Now, the only platform left is the most popular and most important one, you guessed it right.. ANDROID.
Adobe has done really great job with AIR so far and they are progressing in the right direction. But I have some complaints as far as AIR on Android is concerned. At some point, I started to feel that Adobe has shifted its focus on making AIR work great on iPad and left the Android platform behind.

As you can see from the image above, AIR on Android runs differently than other two platforms (iOS, Blackberry Tablet OS). To run AIR apps on Android, you need to install AIR runtime on Android. Now, this is where I think Adobe has done a little mistake. They took the same model of like Flash Player plugin installation to run SWF files in browser, and AIR installation to run Native Apps on Desktop and Android. This approach doesn't work for Native Apps and makes no sense to most of the developers and so many non-technical end users.

They have already got two perfect solutions for this problem, either adapt the same model for AIR on Android as AIR on iOS OR do it the way you have done it on BlackBerry Tablet OS. I'm writing this post because I saw the same issue raised by so many developers on different websites and I personally wanted this to be done. This issue has made AIR suffer on Android, that is one of reasons why we haven't seen so many great AIR apps on Android.

With the release of AIR 3.0 with hardware-accelerated graphics, the situation is going to be changed and we'll be able to make more complex games and apps for all the platforms, its necessary to make the AIR more consistent over all the different platforms.

Please LIKE, +1 or share this post if you agree and want this to be done. Let the message reach Adobe officials.

Flash On!

Update:  I'm really grateful to Michael Chaize & Serge Jespers from Adobe for quickly responding to this post and provide helpful information regarding the issue discussed above.

Adobe has already heard the voices of Flash Developers and they are implementing the same model as AIR on iOS for all other platforms (Desktop and Android) with Captive Runtime for AIR feature in upcoming version AIR 3. Thank you to all the Adobe Evangelists for great support to Flash community. I'm proud to be part of it.

More information about AIR 3 & Flash Player 11 beta including Captive Runtime feature can be found on this official blog post: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/07/adobe-air-3-and-flash-player-11-desktop-beta-for-developers-now-available.html

I'm sure they have some big surprises for us for Adobe MAX 2011. I'm really looking forward to it. Fingers crossed!

SWF to HTML5 Converters

Having trouble creating banners and animations in HTML5/CSS3? Now, you can use best tool in the market to make your animations and convert it into HTML5 to work on all the devices. Here is how:

Adobe and Google have released Wallaby and Swiffy respectively to convert SWF to HTML5.


Adobe Wallaby
"Wallaby" is the codename for an experimental technology that converts the artwork and animation contained in Adobe® Flash® Professional (FLA) files into HTML.

Please note that not all Flash Professional features are supported in the HTML5 format. See these Wallaby Release Notes to know what features are supported, differences between browsers and currently known issues.

Adobe Wallaby is a little AIR application, which you can download and install it in your computer.
Download Link: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/

Wallaby example by Mr. Lee Brimelow: http://blog.theflashblog.com/?p=2625


Google Swiffy
Swiffy allows you to convert Flash SWF files to HTML5, so you can use any supported modern browser to load the content, even if the browser happens to be Mobile Safari. "Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari."

Online Application Link: http://swiffy.googlelabs.com

Swiffy example by Mr. Lee Brimelow: http://blog.theflashblog.com/?p=2787

See this release announcement for more details:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/google-swiffy-converts-flash-to-html5.html



Both these tools are in beta/testing versions with their limitations and issues, but these tools give glimpse of what to come next and these tools will graduate from labs to fully working products.
These two companies are putting their efforts to make these two technologies grow and live together, they haven't created these tools to facilitate the iDevices only, but they took this step forward to enhance the use of technology. Now you can use your favorite tool in which you have been working from many years and have good expertise in it to create compelling animations for the web and convert it into HTML5 for those devices which only support HTML5. Now more designers, developers can publish their content for all the different kind of devices available today.

Adobe and Google support Flash and HTML5, you know why? Because they love CHOICE. They know that both Flash and HTML5 have great future ahead together, and the most important thing is the end user is least bothered about what technology has been used to deliver a great experience over the web. So, have fun with these tools and be patient if you don't get desired results as these tools are in their initial phases of development and will be more mature with time.

FLASH ON!

Some Videos from YouTube: