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!
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!
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