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phonefusionryan
Inspiring
May 15, 2017
Question

HTML Target for AIR (WebGL / WebAssembly)

  • May 15, 2017
  • 5 replies
  • 4938 views

@chris.campbell What are your thoughts about this?

There is a Feature Request on the tracker on Adobe https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/AIR-4178275 

To me this is honestly THE #1 feature that Adobe should be working on. For so long I decided to stick with AIR/Flash because of it's ability to output to Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and the browser... saying to clients "let me build you a true cross platform solution".   But with the CLEAR browser decline in support for the Flash Player, I have many clients saying the dreaded "so what about html5".

I believe if Adobe wants AIR to remain 1 of the top contenders in cross platform development this MUST happen.

Regardless of the votes that appear on the tracker, can someone from Adobe comment on this? Have you guys seen the flood of votes. Are you deciding? if you could just acknowledge you see it and are thinking about it, It would put so many people at ease.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    5 replies

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    Rarykos
    Participant
    June 16, 2018

    I'm not letting this go.

    Unity has working webGL support. What does Adobe offer? Plain javascript like it was 2008. Dealing with the same problems, again.

    And it's BARELY supported in Animate. I know, because I'm actually trying to work for clients making their interactive HTML content.

    Oh the conversations I've had:
    " I can't do this"

    "This will take a lot of time"

    ...

    For a couple of jobs I've switched to Unity. I can't create rich web content in Animate.

    Adobe MUST create an HTML target for AIR if it wants to stay competitive.

    Less and less people use AIR for mobile apps, other engines provide more functionality.

    Why would anyone use Adobe AIR to create desktop apps? Come on, now.

    And there's no follow up for web content. Clearly, Animate webGL support is more basic and LESS user friendly than AS2 10 years ago.

    What are you doing Adobe?

    natural_criticB837
    natural_criticB837
    Legend
    June 19, 2018

    Yes, official HTML5 support for Air would be nice, but I have my doubts it will happen. In the meantime we are making very good experiences with Haxe and OpenFL. We are in the process of publishing our HTML5 exports now and we still compile to .swf that we wrap with Air for mobile and desktop. So we have one codebase (Haxe) that runs in HTML5 and all Air targets.

    And if in the worst case Air support is dropped by Adobe in the future, we already have a roadmap to compile from Haxe to native targets.

    A
    ASWC
    Inspiring
    June 19, 2018

    Not gonna happen for multiple reasons the first being that HTML5 support is far from perfect between browsers especially IE. But a project like the one in this video generates 0 interest and for me that seems contradictory to the request in this thread. Is it really HTML5 you want or is it just not having to do any work? If it's the second then it all makes more sense to me.

    This is literal as3 to typescript/javascript/webgl conversion.

    kennylerma
    kennylerma
    Participating Frequently
    May 26, 2017

    I do believe the idea of this post is to produce an HTML TARGET from AIR.  Currently, WebAssembly is nowhere near ready for anything.  However, that doesn't mean Adobe shouldn't be at the forefront of exploring this option and getting feedback from the community. 

    With that said, I also believe Adobe should also be working on an immediate javascript / WebGL target from AIR.  Of course it won't have everything that AIR does, but it could satisfy a large majority of businesses that are moving away from ActionScript due to a lack of this very feature.

    Currently, Adobe's only effort is to provide a lackluster Animate export for Canvas and WebGL written in vanilla javascript.  No one working in ActionScript wants to re-write their entire codebase in javascript.

    P
    phonefusionryanAuthor
    Inspiring
    May 26, 2017

    You're right Kenny, people just want ANY option for the browser besides the Flash Player. Just because Web Assembly is not yet ready does not mean Adobe shouldn't be looking into it as an option, if developers waited to only experiment with something when it was finished the web wouldn't be what it is today.

    Z
    zwetan_uk
    Inspiring
    May 26, 2017

    it is easy to say when it is not your own development ressources that are on the line

    there are many other things more useful that the Adobe AIR Team could be investigating imho

    Z
    zwetan_uk
    Inspiring
    May 26, 2017

    the issue AIR-4178275 HTML Target for Air (WebGL / WebAssembly) is dated from 08/03/2016 (August 2016)

    the latest announcement WebAssembly consensus and end of Browser Preview is dated from 28 Feb 2017

    People want a "silver bullet" that "magically convert their SWF into something that works on the web without a plugin"

    and think "OMG WebAssembly *IS* the solution" while there is not even an initial version of the WebAssembly spec published yet

    WebAssembly (the first instance, the MVP) is only supported in Chrome 57 and Firefox 52 since March 2017
    Look at Chrome Platform Status for WebAssembly, MS Edge and Safari are still "in development"

    translate: WebAssembly is not ready yet and not final
    people should read the FAQ

    Colin Holgate
    Colin Holgate
    Inspiring
    May 24, 2017

    Something that seems wrong in your request is that AIR is just one of the publishing options from an ActionScript 3 project. That could be AIR for desktop, Android, or iOS. AIR isn't the overall publishing system itself.

    Taking Adobe Animate as an example authoring environment, it can do those three AIR publishes, and it can also publish OAM for use in Muse and Dreamweaver, SWF Archive for use in After Effects, SWF for browser plugin playback, standalone projectors for Mac and Windows, HTML5 Canvas, HTML5 WebGL 2D, video for Premiere and other editors/compressors, and a few other custom formats.

    ActionScript 3 can do so many things that can't easily be done in HTML5 that if you were to use AS3 for developing HTML5 you would need to make sure to only do things that can be translated to JavaScript. Imagine if Animate helped with that, and would only let you write code that can work in the published HTML5, that would help prevent you from trying to do features that can't work. That is effectively what CreateJS is, an AS3 style library that does quite a lot, but not everything that normal AS3 can do.

    This isn't to say that you shouldn't keep requesting automatic conversion of all AS3 features to HTML5, I would love to be wrong about how hard that would be! Meanwhile, you do have some HTML5 options, where you can reuse a lot of what you needed to make the AS3 version.

      P
      phonefusionryanAuthor
      Inspiring
      May 24, 2017

      Granted I hear you and agree, though I wasn't the one who created the request, I'm just someone who's trying to get it in as many faces as possible. Whether the right wording is used, i think the general idea of what it is has been conveyed enough to convince 400+ people to vote.

      The feature request mentions that limitations would be acceptable, we just need the option.

      Maybe I'm making a wrong assumption, but do you work with Adobe Colin Holgate? I see you post a lot and the MVP tag suggests at least a  somewhat connection to them. Do you know if they are aware of this or have seen it? I'm definitely open for the discussion but the main reason of this thread was to hopefully get some kind of ANYTHING response as to what they think about it.

      Other the last 3 years I've been watching popular requests on the Bug Base get lots and lots of votes, but nothing happens. (Ex: Adobe Air Windows 8 Support  got literally over 650+ votes, and yet we NEVER got any official word or any response from Adobe).  https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/AIR-3648920

      I just want SOME KIND of response from Adobe saying they see it, so I can know whether or not they are ignoring it.

      natural_criticB837
      natural_criticB837
      Legend
      May 24, 2017

      Colin has voiced his skepticism about the feature a couple of times already, and I always like to disagree The strong part about Air is how easy it is to publish to all the different platforms like mobile and web through Flash. However Flash is clearly declining in popularity, so to maintain the ability to publish to mobile and web from one codebase, an HTML5 target is needed.

      Adobe has acknowledged the feature request, an Adobe employee has commented in the feature request asking developers to continue to vote if the desire the feature. I don't think that means much though, they did the same in the Windows 8 support. Browse through the comments and you should find it..

      P
      phonefusionryanAuthor
      Inspiring
      May 24, 2017

      So I've decided I will NOT be ignore on this issue. I will bump this thread every day from here on out until I get an answer

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