Known Participant

Question

Air is Dead

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
December 27, 2013
35 replies
103027 views

Let's face it guys. Air is Dead. Look at the feature list for 4.0. The pace of development and bug fixes have slowed to a crawl.

It's presented to us as a mobile development platform but you can't pick a video from the Gallery, read the Contacts database or Play a movie. The forums are full of bugs and when Adobe rarely chimes in it's to ask us to vote. Shouldn't you just fix bugs?

It's touted as a cross platform mobile environment but it's not listed in a single article comparing them. No new developer in his right mind would program in Flash at this point. I did for ten years but I'm done. Tired of spending hours on bugs and workarounds.

I wish Adobe would spin out the two or three guys still working on it and open source it. Maybe they could call themselves MacroMedia.

Performance issues

This topic has been closed for replies.

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MonicaMP

Known Participant

Hello everyone

After writing on this thread, I have finally decided to end any Air development.

I wrote an article on Medium explaining why if anyone wants to know. Why I’m finally breaking up with Flash for good

Take care

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furian

Participating Frequently

pierBover - I fully understand you. If you've read - we're dealing with this topic for a long time. Still, neither Chris not anyone from Adobe tells something important. They say they are improving things and they work on the project. Check their road map..

The battle is lost. That's why I stopped posting here. But I'm happy that more people like you feel betrayed by Adobe

I'll again post something from the previous AIR release, which I would TRULLY LOVE to get responded from Chris or anyone else (but I know I won't):

From Flash Player 14 / AIR 14 Release Notes: [Chrome] Angry Birds on Facebook now works as expected (3761933)

It seems like this is the "important" stuff they're doing. pierBover - you won't get answered. I realized that months ago. No one will answer when you will get concurrency or why we still can't swap StageVideo and Stage3D. You are neither going to get an answer when Bitmap upload to GPU will be fixed, as it now takes decades to do so. They know what's important, but they also know what their team left members can handle. You won't get the answer you want, neither am I This is a huge company, they will never state they did wrong and failed.

They will keep posting micro updates on stuff that's half-baked (like only Android concurrency) and people like the ones above will keep clapping hands, because they see AIR good enough for their high-school projects, or single Main.as file ones Sorry to say it, but I don't believe ANYONE that used Stage3D with Feathers for UI rich app with dynamic loading content (+images) would say it's good enough. Especially when EVERY single "feature" needs native extensions.

So just let it be. They failed, you need new technology. Maybe you're like me - spend most of your time on Flash, knowing nothing good enough to just make the switch in one day. Hopefully you're not. Good luck with the new things you're up to, and cheers for the great support that Adobe got from your side. They'll regret they lost people like you, and me.

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seyfx001

Inspiring

i hope the new roadmap (october 16) will be answer your questions!

this is only a hope...

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MonicaMP

Known Participant

Consider this: how long have we been waiting for and demanding Workers in iOS?

Unity, Shiva, Unreal, Haxe / OpenFL, RoboVM, Xamarin, and even Phonegap have provided some form of threading / concurrency for years. Those solutions are mostly open source or developed by small / medium companies (compared to Adobe). As an example Unity Technologies has 300 employees and is miles ahead in the gaming industry. Adobe has 11000 employees, and of course they won't disclose how many of those are focused on the Air / Flash platform.

If Adobe, one of the best and biggest software developers in the world, hasn't yet given us that fundamental feature is simply because Adobe is not investing enough resources to Air to make that happen. Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere... all those are getting significant new features on a constant basis. Flash / Air is not.

Like someone else said in this thread, Flash/Air is the new Fireworks or Director. It will be kept alive to be an usable tool for the hard die fans, but it will not be given any significant amount of investment by Adobe. Not enough to keep up with the competition with other mobile multiplatform tools.

chris.campbell

Community Manager

iOS workers is still on the roadmap. I don't have a release date, but I know it'll be an extended beta type of feature. Most of the concurrency work was gated on the new AOT compiler work, which is still being actively worked on. Lots of bug and performance fixes were added to AIR 15 and we're not stopping there.

User Unknow

Legend

Chris, thanks for the update!

Also want to suggest you how the Team can save some resources. Adobe AIR SDK must have external configs for anything (languages, icon validator and etc).

Each year ppl screaming here because when the Team fixing some issue - people asking to add new icon size, splash support, languages and etc. The Team spend extra time for this and holding improvements. So if they could make external validation (or without it (better) of icons, configs and etc options so anyone can use that they wants - this will works better.

The Team can doing own job and consumers will not distract the Team with this. You know how many ppl crying when they can't upload iOS app because Air don't support some language so they aksing me doing this patch Or new icon set..

Think about it )

User Unknow

Legend

By the way! This video from Deep Under The Sky Credits game that fully developed using Adobe Air and Starling It's already on iOS and Android. And planned to be published on Mac/PC on Steam. Awesome crazy game!

Giles Corey

Participating Frequently

AIR works great, and only gets better with time. Can we please stop all the whining? The new x86 Android support for AIR is amazing. It's what 90% of the complainers in this thread were whining about all along. They were all saying "AIR is dead because they won't give us x86 Android support." But guess what... we finally got what we were waiting for. x86 support is here, NOW.

The fact that Adobe goes from complete silence to suddenly implementing a massive feature like that proves that they have a versatile workforce committed to shifting gears for us at a moment's notice as soon as they are able to.

Most of you are really just here to vent because you are frustrated over how painful it is to develop for mobile, and you need a scapegoat for your anger. You blame Adobe, when really it's just a default condition of being a developer for mobile. If you had tried to make the same app with anything else, it would have taken 10x longer, with 10x as many gotcha's from native quirks on different devices. So the next time you get a slight headache from mobile development, just keep in mind it would have been a full blown migraine if AIR wasn't there to help you, and try to resist the urge to come here and whine and spread libel about Adobe. It's telling that they don't even moderate this forum despite all the vicious words; it shows they committed 100% of their employees to working on actual important things instead of wasting precious time pruning internet forum topics.

I would not even have tried to ever make mobile apps if it weren't for AIR. I was able to horizontally transfer all my prior ActionScript 3 knowledge built over the years directly into app-making, and the same goes for most of you. Instead of spending months learning a new language, we were able to use something we already knew for years. Let's be grateful for that, and for an awesome tool called AIR. Thank you for everything Adobe.

User Unknow

Legend

I read somewhere yesterday that Unity3D will now support x86 Android. But currently it's not supporting and this is under development. So this feature was implemented into Adobe Air faster than in Unity3D. Why anyone don't tell me that Unity3D is dead?

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superduperjmas

Participating Frequently

I makes a lot of sense, why sticking with the facts when you can make it all up ... One billion AIR runtime installs become one billion AIR app installs ... But who are you really trying to convince when making this up? Probably just yourself.

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makc3d

Inspiring

superduperjmas no, those are literally one billion AIR app installs, see AIR app installs cross a billion They even have this nice breakdown chart:

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mola2alex

Inspiring

Read this entire thread and I have mixed feelings. I have always loved Flash and AIR but right now, it is a bit painful especially using Flash Pro for mobile apps which is my primary target. Every time a new release of Android or iOS, I have my fingers crossed that they haven't broke AIR or broke an extension (that may or may not be supported). It sounds like AIR is alive and has some roadmap left but it is not reassuring that I should continue to build new apps with this tech.

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rionero in volture

Participating Frequently

Adobe ditch FLV support in CC 2014 | Patrick Wall

natural_criticB837

Legend

In case you guys missed it: ActionScript rises to #14 on the Tiobe Index

I wonder if this reflects only the fact that AS becoming increasingly popular for mobile apps or its at least partly boosted by all the discussions about Flash going down all over the web (not sure how TIOBE exactly measures that).

Anyway I would take this as a good sign and Adobe managers can not ignore this

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rionero in volture

Participating Frequently

I think that NO ONE here would question the goodness or as3 flash/air/flex.

I think that you simply ACCUSATIONS Adobe had foolishly abandoned the project.

This is just to satisfy Apple fans (many graphs are). They have invested on HTML5 JavaScript 'cause it was COOL.

Other companies were not so STUPID: Xamarin and Unity ... for example. Now Adobe could have a wonderful tool if it were not for its manager

(sorry for my bad english)

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superduperjmas

Participating Frequently

"the best 2d framework for Stage3D is written in it"

This is purely subjective and therefore meaningless. Genome2D is only partially open source, much like Starling design choices made in that framework are questionable, etc. When it was time for us to go the Stage3D road we looked at Starling and were amazed by it's poor quality, performance and beginner oriented design, Genome2D was disqualified by it use of signals, partial open source, so we have made our own which btw some companies had to do too due to the lack of serious framework out there. You probably think those framework are contributing in saving AIR and Flash, I think they are contributing in putting them down just like Adobe itself does.

flexengineer

Participating Frequently

Jee and I thought I was bas at complaining, you make me feel like the Dalai

Lamaa!!

Your developers life must be miserable because obviously if you were

rocking anything truly better you would not be here winning.

Sent with my Samsung Galaxy SIII

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superduperjmas

Participating Frequently

Axe? The technology that was and still is born dead? It doesn't matter what it does or how good it is, the market has decided right at the start that Axe will only be for indie devs and nothing else. What's the job market for AXE? Oh yes now I remember there's not even one.

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TrickeyDee

Participating Frequently

Come on mate, it's only 9 years old... and the best 2d framework for Stage3D is written in it (no not Starling... the other one). Anyway, I've inadvertently redirected the topic of the thread, so I'll back out again now.

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TrickeyDee

Participating Frequently

Tell you what, here's a solution. Lets all stop arguing and just use haxe and openFL instead of as3. As I'm sure most of you know it's basically the same language but much better, with features such as superior interfaces, better getters/setters and best of all, inline functions; and it can end up producing swfs that run 20% faster. Then if air does die (which I don't believe it will in the very near future at least) then you can just publish to other targets including windows, iOS, android and HTML5.

Everyone's happy!

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TrickeyDee

Participating Frequently

How about we let this thread die as well then?