Adobe Max 2010: Adobe AIR everywhere
Adobe has officially released AIR 2.5, the latest version of Adobe’s runtime. With this latest release Adobe is giving AIR the same treatment it gave to Flash with the 10.1 release, which was to bring to multiple screens.
The AIR 2.5 runtime is already available for the Android platform and will be available on the Blackberry Tablet as well. Application built using Adobe AIR will install and work like any other application on the the mobile, and will even be available in the app market for these platforms. When a user first tries to install an AIR application while the runtime is not installed, the application will automatically direct the user to download the runtime form the market. Adobe hopes to improve this experience by working wiht device OEMs to have the runtime pre-installed on phones.
While Flash 10.1 and Adobe AIR came with many features such as geolocation, multitouch / gestures support, accelerometer etc, the latest release has added further features commonly used on Andorid mobiles such as, still image and video capture, microphone access, and support for embedding the native browser within the AIR window. Adobe plans to add these features to the iPhone packager tool as well to bring its capabilities to parity with the Android version.
The mobile version is not the only version to get improvements. The desktop version too has added a few useful features, especially for the browser component of AIR. Earlier, the WebKit browser component in AIR did not include support for some features such as shadow and font support, these have now been included, allowing developers to build richer AIR apps with HTML. Additionally, GPU acceleration for H.264 video decoding is now enabled in the desktop version as well, although the functionality is currently only present for Windows.
Finally Adobe has also unveiled AIR for TVs, such as the Google TV. Adobe has collaborated with Samsung to bring AIR to their Samsung Apps platform, which will allow people to purchase AIR apps through Samsung TVs and BluRay players.
For a detailed look into what is new in this release of Adobe AIR, check out this article on the Adobe website.