Yes I also agree! Sadly there are parts to this that are outside of our control, particularly given the use of different companies' trademarks and other legal issues that need to be resolved. It would make our lives a lot easier if we could just push everything out via a simple website.. ... View more

We've started distributing AIR SDK v33 - if you're not getting information about this, please email us at adobe.support@harman.com. There are still a number of delays to us getting our basic website up and running though, legal/marketing/security reviews are still ongoing. Once that's up, I'll post a link and everyone can just go and get it rather than us having to spend all the effort on manually maintaining the distribution! thanks ... View more

Yes, Google updated that page at the end of last week, we've just sent round an update. It's for existing applications, so new apps published post 1st August will still need to have the 64-bit support. We're obviously still intending to support this and just sent round an update.. ... View more

Hi We're pushing out our third beta version shortly (tonight I hope - internal testing is looking good).. Our challenge then to get the 'full' release out is more about infrastructure than it is about the AIR code itself: worst-case we'll keep doing things manually, but there is some progress towards getting a web site/portal together for people to go and download the SDK themselves and to do the subscription/management of this. thanks   Andrew ... View more

Animate should continue to work with the new AIR SDKs. There's an initial [trivial] issue with how Animate is version-checking the AIR SDK version which we need to resolve, and there needs to be a way for you to specify whether to package with the 32-bit or 64-bit runtime; I believe that the Animate team will provide this via a UI at some point, like how they do with ARM vs x86, but for the short term it will likely be a config file setting. Flash Builder and Adobe Animate are handled completely separately, so we're nothing to do with those; obviously we're going to try to ensure that everyone's favourite IDEs are working with the new SDK. ... View more

Yes I agree - although of course, ActionScript is also JIT-compiled to machine code on Android and AOT compiled on iOS. When I meant "mature" I was more thinking about things like Angular, where most of the tutorials and stackoverflow responses seem to be out of date because the framework itself is evolving, APIs are being updated etc etc. Adobe have done a very good job of keeping the APIs always compatible so that you can still compile and run old code on a new runtime. ... View more

Awesome discussion, thanks everyone! To talk about the web target, there are two sides to this, or rather two ways in which it could be achieved. The first is in the development tools, where you can write your ActionScript like normal, and then publish it for a web target rather than publishing it to SWF format. This is what things like Royale are doing, and whilst the generation of JavaScript (or WebAssembly) is possible, the main issue then is in how the APIs are implemented i.e. flash.display.Graphics, and all the rest. Getting them all to work would perhaps be impractical, if not impossible, given the difference in rendering models between the Flash Player and a DOM-based browser. The second option then is to have a "runtime" that is written in WebAssembly and loads up a generic SWF file and runs it. So in this sense, you're still creating the SWF files as usual with the open tools like FlashDevelop etc, and then it's loaded into the equivalent of the Flash Player, sitting within a browser. Which would be great, but again is an awful lot of work and you're looking at all those APIs again. Trust me, the Flash Player (and AIR) code is not simple, there are complexities in there which are pretty astounding which are behind things like the API compatibility matching and security, sandboxing etc, not to mention hooks for supporting Scout and the Flash debugger. But yes, it would be great if we could do this! I think we may be getting ahead of ourselves at the moment though.. I agree on all the marketing side of things, we're looking at a gradual handover of some of the material from Adobe's development centre and yes should be looking at promoting this and encouraging the existing community as well as then trying to promote it.. ... View more

Hi Just to address a few of the points raised here: - Samsung, and the wider HARMAN companies, weren't a factor in our decision here. We have been porting AIR and Flash Player for years, so in terms of a choice of who to take this on, we're better qualified than most as we already have a team with experience of the thousands of C/C++ files that goes to make up this runtime..! And we do know and love it.. I definitely appreciate the effort that Daniel, Jack, Josh and others have put into this technology and ecosystem and want to do something to try to leverage their experience, but it's early days still for this. - it's not something we "bought" or something that we've done in order to support any existing internal products or apps using AIR. Afaik we don't have any of our own products using AIR, although it would be something I'm keen to try to make happen! But the way the company is organised means that entities such as Samsung opcos or our Connected Car division would be treated like a customer to us, just like any other customer. - our 'legacy' work - i.e. the existing ports that we maintain and support for embedded platforms - are not and would not have been impacted by this. We already had the agreements in place with Adobe to support those customers regardless of what Adobe decided to do with the AIR SDK. But we see this as an extension of that work, so we now work to address a much wider base of customers and switch our support into a 'product' mode rather than being services-based. I'm interested by the "less mature than modern cross-platform frameworks" comment though, as I see it as a lot more mature than some technologies that keep changing so dramatically and that come and go quite a lot. Anyway, we want to encourage your feedback as to how we can make this product more relevant for you all! From our perspective, we want to make this attractive for people to still use and for new people to pick up. So, please keep commenting, as even the so-called negative opinions are useful for us to understand where the ecosystem's concerns are so that we can try our best to address them! thanks   Andrew ... View more

Hi We'll notify about the beta via the mailing list of people who have registered their interest via the email address or website contact form, if all goes well then we're aiming for this to be released at the end of next week but it's dependent upon a successful test run! - first time we're doing all of this so there may be sudden issues, but I'm conscious that it may still be better to release a beta with known issues so that the community can start testing too, and updating ANEs etc. ASWC - I'm not sure what logic is behind your statement, but I would actually like the direction of the AIR runtime to be more dictated by the community, so whilst we have our ideas, it would probably serve everyone better if we took input from apps/games developers before trying to finalise a roadmap. That said, we will try to get something published along with our website/portal, so I would hope it is definitely quicker than you fear 🙂 Keep the feedback coming though everyone, it's good to hear people's concerns as that helps focus our attention on what's important to the community! thanks   Andrew ... View more

To add some more details in case this helps: this had been long in discussions but we didn't know if it was going ahead until very recently. So internally we'd limited our investment to the software engineer efforts involved in the immediate concern of the 64-bit Android platform, and that remains the team's primary focus for the next month or two. From a business perspective, rather than letting AIR just decline away, we believe it makes more sense to encourage people to stick with the technology and even to try to build this up so that new people come to it. However, I do realise that all you're getting currently is just words from me and we don't yet have the proper structures in place for this (website, marketing, roadmap etc), so I can see where you're coming from. We've got a bit of a slow start currently but are aiming to start getting these up and running shortly! Thanks ... View more

Yes, we're aware of this one and it should be sorted with the v33 SDK. Thanks! ... View more

Just to clarify the 'HARMAN' thing: it's a big company, but please don't read too much into what our plans are for AIR by looking at what HARMAN does or the fact it's owned by Samsung. We're taking this on in our business unit which is separate from all the automotive and audio products that make up the bulk of HARMAN's business. So it's not something we're doing for our own internal purposes, it's because we see value in the runtime and have a lot of expertise invested in this over the years. Yes it will need to be something that we offer commercially because we need to invest in the development of it, but I would love the future features/roadmap to be directed by the people who use it most i.e. you! thanks ... View more

Okay thanks for that - yes we've not got into the details of this but I will check with our lead Android guy on Monday! I'm wondering whether there are some options we can provide around this, will chat to the ANE providers about it... Thanks ... View more

Thanks Chris - yes I was wondering about saying that I know you and the Adobe team had wanted to be more communicative but while the discussions were ongoing, that wasn't possible. Thank you for all the work that you have been putting in (and are continuing to put in) to help us with this transition! ... View more

To clarify the other platforms: we're not changing those yet, we're starting gradually and prioritising Android. Setting up all the build environments for the other platforms will take a while so for now I'd suggest using Adobe's SDK v32 for those, and only using v33 for Android. To make things simpler, we will probably just include the v32 runtime binaries into the v33 SDK so you can use a single SDK for all platforms, but the redistributable packages created for Windows/Mac/iOS would actually be v32 (and would fall outside of the commercial distribution license that we're putting in place). I might have to clear that with Adobe though..! A few more answers: - Caslav - thanks for the suggestions. We're starting off with minimal changes in our first release but will look at some of these via the updates. Building for 64-bit via Flash Builder is possible, we've checked this and you can add an extra "-arch arm8" parameter into the packaging command within the export settings. - Chaky - I had been looking for those sorts of suggestions recently, I remembered a thread somewhere about that. Those sorts of changes, to Matrix/geometry operations, are relatively straightforward and could probably be incorporated with very low risk; if you have a definitive list of such updates, we can look into adding those sooner.. thanks Andrew ... View more

I think we need to have a virtual "suggestions box"...! Language updates in AS3 - so for example the 'arrow functions' syntax perhaps? I'm interested in what else people might want out of the language.. To be clear though, there's a distinction between the compiler and the underlying language elements, so for example we can update things like the Array.insertAt() methods and add in new ActionScript top-level functions etc.. for syntax updates - and possibly for new primitive types - we would need the compiler code though. Updating the WebKit version would be a lot of work! I would be interested to see the number of people who are looking for that. Is StageWebView not a suitable alternative? We can potentially do bespoke development where there's a need... How about if people have an idea for a new feature, they can email adobe.support@harman.com, and put "[Feature request]" at the start of their email subject..? Until we have our own forum/bugbase set up, thiis may have to suffice... thanks ... View more

Some interesting ideas here, thanks everyone for the feedback! In terms of Android versions, the idea is to make it work across as many devices as possible. If you'd have a preference for using newer features that wouldn't then work as ANEs if the runtime was targeting the older support, then we can look into this... The compilers we have in binary form and are licensed to provide these as part of the AIR SDK, so no worries on that front. I don't think they've been updated for a while... although of course the 'older' AS3 compiler is open sourced and now managed by Apache Flex, and the Royale guys have been adding interesting features to their branch of this e.g. private constructors, which caught my eye..! We'll see.. iOS, Mac and Windows: Adobe will continue to support AIR v32 on the desktop platforms so those aren't a priority for us yet, but we'll look at bringing in support for those in the next year. iOS yes we will be supporting but we're focussing heavily on the Android platform first because of these 1st August deadlines! ANEs and including those .. that's an interesting thought, we can discuss further with those guys. Making the whole situation simpler (i.e. so you don't have to pay lots of different entities) would perhaps be useful for developers, but we'd have to look at how this works in practice to make sure that the ANE vendors don't lose out. There's a similar possibility with Starling and Feathers, although of course those are free currently (unlike ANEs) so it would depend on whether Daniel/Josh want to change their commercial model. I think some of those discussions may have to come later, just from a practical perspective we've got a lot of work to get done here for the Android platform and setting everything up! So extra packages/bundles with third-party software is a nice idea but fairly low on the priority list current...! Keep the ideas coming in though 🙂 thanks ... View more

Yes I almost said the same Officially it needs to stay as "Adobe AIR". As long as you don't expand the abbreviation, that works, otherwise it sounds silly! But yes I take the point from reply #169... I think the Android platform details look the same - sorry, can't check that right now to confirm it for sure - it's the NDK that was updated but all this should be pretty backwards compatible. You'll end up with APKs for 32-bit ARM, 64-bit ARM, and x86, and as long as they have the same application ID then the Play Store works out the rest... ... View more

Linux is an interesting one - we've supported AIR on Linux the whole time 🙂 but for our OEM customers who pay for the integration services. If there's a business case for reinstating Linux support for the AIR SDK, then we would consider it..! HARMAN itself, yes lots of automotive and audio work, but that's all independent of this initiative. We don't have "AIR to JS" migration work, but we do have Flash to JS migration business because of the browser limitation coming in at the end of 2020. This definitely isn't about "helping our business" - it's tiny, in the grand scheme of things for HARMAN - but we want it to be successful, and for that we know it needs to be properly maintained and updated. But yes, it also has to be commercially viable: the money coming from the product will fund the team that develops it. I'm hoping this has plenty of years left in it, personally I love this technology and use ActionScript/AIR for any little utility that needs to be knocked up. Re the comment above about the ActionScript compiler: yes it's distributed with the AIR SDK, but we don't have the source code for this from Adobe...  There are other tools that we had discussed e.g. ATFViewer, and still some open issues, so we will see how this goes. It's close collaboration, it's not like Adobe are just throwing the whole thing over the fence at us! thanks ... View more

Hi It will remain as Adobe AIR, we don't want to (or have the right to) rebrand it. And Samsung probably don't know anything about this, they bought HARMAN a couple of years ago but we're relatively separate operationally, at least in my part of HARMAN.. IDE-wise there shouldn't be any difference: most IDEs will use the AIR SDK under the hood, and we're intentionally keeping the structure of this the same so that there's minimal updates required. Some IDEs may need to add an 'arm8' option in a dialog box perhaps.. I'm fairly hopeful, and certainly encouraged by the responses that I have seen around this announcement. We've perhaps not been 'behind the scenes' in a way that you expect: we've not been working for Adobe on this as suppliers, but instead we've had/got a license from them to have their source code and port it to platforms that they don't support themselves. So for example Flash Lite powered the user interface of over 5 million vehicles, AIR was on a large number on a QNX-based product, and we're still supporting AIR for an automotive supplier on an embedded Linux OS. Likewise we support Flash Player and AIR on a number of Set Top Box products... less of these now, as companies had been moving away from this platform, but it means that we have a very good knowledge about the AIR software. While I would love to work on an "ActionScript 4", and had previews of this prior to Adobe canning it, I don't think that's going to happen. I've been following the "language improvements" being made by the folk working on Apache Royale with interest, some of these could have value - but we're not supporting the ActionScript Compiler, just the AIR runtime and its SDK. The developer websites and language reference site will continue to be maintained by Adobe for a while, we'll be discussing what happens to them post 2020 though, if necessary we can take those on. Starling and Feathers are great projects, but currently we're unable to commit to any funding in the way that Adobe had been doing this. It wasn't factored into our calculations.. I would like to be able to support them in some way, perhaps via some sort of freemium approach that we could help with, we shall have to see. Hope that gives a few more answers! thanks, Andrew ... View more

Thanks for all the interest and questions! We'll be providing more details before too long and will take these on board. And yes, happily there's a lot of traffic hitting our website and email address, which is nice .. but am off out now for the evening so will have to leave things unattended for a bit! ... View more

That's the plan! It obviously needs to be commercially viable for us but we believe it will be, by requesting small fees from a high volume of developers... ... View more

We'll hopefully be able to provide more details before too long, but yes, we're looking forward to supporting AIR; Adobe's blog post hopefully explains it, and we'll get an updated website with FAQ up and running shortly. The plan is for AIR SDK to be free to download and use for hobbyists/smaller developers i.e. having a 'free tier', and then charging for larger/commercial use. The charges are then used to fund our development team and so the more people who use it, the more we can develop it! We're aiming to keep charges to low/reasonable levels though, so as not to impact folk too much (i.e. small fees but from lots of companies). HARMAN (or the part of it within which I work) has been in partnership with Adobe since 2006 working on integration/support of Flash runtimes for mobile/embedded platforms, so we've got a lot of experience - Adobe wouldn't have done this otherwise! And yes, ANEs need to be updated, we've already internally updated and checked the ADT tools to ensure this works, it should be fairly seamless I hope. We'll be providing a beta release to Distriqt, MyFlashLabs and others as soon as the updated SDK license agreement has passed our legal and financial review process. This has been a long time in coming but we're excited to see how this works out! thanks   Andrew ... View more