Adobe Animate compatibility in Harman era

I am one of those people that started off as a pure graphic designer but wanted to make my designs interactive, so Flash became my inspiration after seeing all the work being done by agencies such as 2advanced studios and Fantasy Interactive. There was no better IDE than Flash / Animate to allow the designer / developer hybrid to excel. I could truly focus on the visual UI and program functionality within the IDE using the timeline, or integrate external code using inlcludes (external actionscript files). Once mobile devices gained prominence, Adobe AIR combined with MyFlashLab’s and Distriqt’s ANEs allowed me to truly innovate. Since the Animate IDE and as3 language was so mature, it made things so much easier to debug and release without having  to constantly worry about the next release of the language having breaking changes (ex. Polymer, Angular and React). The community supporting this tech is more passionate than any other I’ve seen. The biggest challenge is promoting it to the younger generations and bringing back the designer / developer hybrids. Nothing against the typical front-end devs, but I was always a firm believer that UI should always be the responsibility of the designers and not be coded from scratch.

As far as what I hope for from Harman, here’s my wishlist (My focus has been Automotive learning applications, but have been experimenting non stop)

1. A robust and secure httpClient library that can handle the latest SSL and TLS security requirements for REST web services (Neo 4j Graph QL would be nice as well)

2. Native Augmented Reality for iOS ( ARKit 3) and equivalent Android framework

3. VR Video/image integration

4. Advanced Geotracking / Geofencing features

5. Asynchronous image encoding / decoding

6.  Better push notification integration

7. Better GPU performance

8. More advanced Webview integration with Air

9. Ability to embed / develop social features (feeds)

10. More integrations with Cloud backend services ( Firebase/AWS)

11. More support for video (ex. Alpha support)

12. Mobile tutorials for AIR (Animate, Flex, Intel IDEA, Haxe, Flash builder, etc)

I will end my post by saying that Flash / AIR has really allowed me to innovate and execute any idea that comes into my mind without much difficulty. I am able to protype and release solutions in very tight timelines without sacrificing quality or effectiveness.

I want to also express my desire to help educate and promote this tech any way I can. I  have helped develop samples / tutorials in Adobe Animate for Distriqt in the past to get users up and running quickly.

In the end, we all want to build experiences that are memorable and easy to use. Adobe AIR allows us to do just that. Thanks for listening.

I hope whoever takes over (or keeps) Animate will fix the atrocious situation with app icons. Switching between platforms (Android and iOS) is a nightmare. Manually selecting all the iOS resolutions every time you switch is such a waste of time.

Come on guys. It's 2019. Just accept one hi-res image and scale it behind the scenes. Can the Animate team assign a junior developer for a day and fix that?

Animate can work with any version of the AIR SDK so it doesn't need to be "supported" in order to work with any AIR version HARMAN will come up with. I don't see either Adobe removing the AIR option in Animate in the future. In conclusion Animate will probably work with AIR as long as AIR is alive.