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This book will detail the various enhancements, new functionalities, and general improvements
available in this version of the Adobe AIR runtime. Each item is explained
in detail, and when possible, a series of screen captures and a full code example will be
provided, enabling you to both grasp the new feature in a visual way, and integrate the
feature into your own code quickly, based upon example.
AIR, of course, shares many core functionalities with the Adobe Flash Player. During
the development cycle between Flash Player 10 and Flash Player 10.1, Adobe rewrote
much of the underlying code in order to lay a solid foundation that not only benefited
traditional web experiences, but could also be brought over into new areas such as
mobile and television. This foundation has served to make both Flash Player 10.1–10.3
and AIR 2.5–2.7 very stable while allowing Adobe to begin adding small features upon
each incremental release. In contrast to these incremental versions, with Flash Player
11 and AIR 3 we begin to see the rapid evolution of the Flash Platform runtimes into
something not only great at interactive, gaming, media distribution, and enterprise
applications…but into something that pushes these areas way beyond their previous
limitations.
There is no doubt that mobile application development using the Adobe Flash Platform
has become a topic of increased interest in the application developer communities.
While there are a number of solutions to cross-compile applications to a variety of
mobile platforms using any number of technologies, the ability to do this with such a
proven platform is something that most cannot even hope to match. It is very important
that AIR evolves in a way which not only showcases why it is so relevant in this new
ecosystem, but also why it is (in many cases) the ideal technology platform for advanced
interaction on a multitude of devices. With Adobe ramping up the AIR release schedule
along with more iterative tooling support in Flash Professional and Flash Builder, not
to mention a number of new community partnerships in support of the platform from
both independent framework and third-party tooling support, we can expect great
things in future incremental releases of AIR 3 and within the entire platform ecosystem. |
