Adobe AIR 2017 Roadmap

[kennyTru]

In 2016, Chris Campbell reached out to developers through the Starling community to create wishlist for AIR in 2016.  That worked out pretty well.  However, there has no followup this year.

What can we expect from Adobe and the AIR runtime for 2017?  As the landscape continues to change, many of us rely on Adobe's commitment to AIR.

[Applauz78]

I'd love to hear this as well. I've published over 30 AIR apps to the App Store and Google Play in the last year. Hope to continue this workflow.

[rewb0rn]

Yes, please.

[KramSurfer2]

Yes please as well!   We've many apps in AIR at the moment, both desktop and mobile.  Thanks

[Julien26]

Yes, please !

[chris.campbell · Accepted solution]

Hi guys,

We're working on our 2017 and beyond roadmap, using the Starling thread that Daniel created and refreshed this year for inspiration.  I'll post back to the thread with our thoughts, but encourage those that haven't visited to take a look and see if any of the recent suggestions are appealing or provide feedback for items that haven't been posted.

http://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/air-in-2016-survey-and-christmas-tale/page/7

Thanks,

Chris

[swfisgood]

Great news!

Here was a great suggestion by rewb0rn

Discussion: Structure of the forums

The adobe forums as3/air/flash subforums are kind of all fragmented and hidden. It would be a great help to unify these in some way, perhaps if its an easy fix, even just leaving them the same but have an "all" front page like the starling forums has.

A one stop shop for all your as3 needs!

[RandomReado]

Personally I am not holding my breath. It's been over a month since you said you were "working on" the roadmap for 2017, given we are now in Q2 2017 and still no word on a roadmap. I have given up on Adobe, since Adobe doesn't bother responding to bug reports anymore (and hasn't done for a while) or queries about really useful features that are needed. You only have to look at a few responses in this thread to see what I mean. The reply about the 1.7GB memory limit is a good example, but I'm guessing this sort of thing would be resolved in a 64-bit runtime for Windows, which is a feature that was on the roadmap for 2016 and never got added.

It's obvious that AIR development is dying off slowly, but rather than admit to it, you're just fobbing us off with empty promises, hoping no one will notice the obvious.

I'm disappointed in Adobe, firstly for sacking off the Flex framework to Apache and secondly for ceasing development of the Flash Builder IDE. You're still selling FB yet the software is not maintained anymore according to Adobe support.

[KramSurfer2]

You've received the road map already.   There is non.

I agree with all of your points above.  It's amazing they've let this whole thing die on the vine, especially after investing so much in the cross-platform publishing.  I'm still here because AIR is the EASIEST way to hit my three targets. ( iOS, Windows, MacOS )    I make customized applications with a shelf life of about 6 months, so it makes sense to keep on.  I've been trying to create similar things in Cordova and every experiment has been a waste of time, compared to what I can bang out in AIR.

By the total of 9 posts on this thread, I would have to say everyone noticed.  They have the use metrics and I'm certain it says, relative to the interest in other development tools, AIR is dead.  And 'interest' is where 'growth' is.  There's no profit in something that works well, what else you going to sell?

Peace.

Keith R Morrison

[rewb0rn]

I don't share your sentiment, the Air SDK has received regular updates with new features and improvements. But I agree it would be great if Chris could give an update on the new roadmap.

Thanks in advance.

[vakhtangi]

Uncle Chris, waiting for Roadmap!

[vakhtangi]

Please vote for Softkeyboard custom input feature !!!  Tracker

[ChristianKiefer]

What would be great, is some marketing for AIR... Positive marketing...

Looking in the App Stores searching for "air" in the package name and on websites like AppBrain - the best Android apps and games on Google Play I can see how much successfull apps are created with AIR - but most people don't know that... and most apps in the air showcase are not really the impressive ones...

[ChristianKiefer]

Hi,

there seems to be nothing new from Adobe side to this discussion and the the discussion in the starling forum... is anyone at adobe currently watching this thread?

I want to add a thing to the list that would be really necessary for us - saving images as JPEG in good quality or as lossless png file to the cameraRoll using CameraRolls function addBitmapData - maybe with some parameters for type (jpeg/png) and quality...

And - would it be possible to integrate some widely used functionallity like Push Notification, Native Dialogs, ... ... to the framework? I know there are ANEs for that but we used some 3rd party native extensions and it often ended after an AIR SDK Update in crashes on various devices and other problems which where hard to find and unpossible to fix...

[rewb0rn]

Honestly I don't think these should go into the core framework, rather have someone build an ANE for it.. But I agree it's time for an updated roadmap... Mr Campbell do you read...?

[ChristianKiefer]

I still think various functionallity should be included in the core framework... at least things like saving images to the cameraRoll in good quality (currently an ANEs is required to do this)...

[zwetan_uk]

Most people ask features to be added to the framework to solve their problem of the moment,

it's not how a framework works...

A framework is here for the most common and general case, not your specific use case.

In fact I would argue that as a developer it is your job to program that specific case
to solve the problem of your specific app.

[mattr8755445]

I'd love it if there was a simple way of changing the screen resolution in Desktop AIR. Either an ANE or a built in feature would be great.

This other one isn't really Starling related, but I'd love it if Desktop AIR supported LOW and MEDIUM stage quality like Flash Player does. This would be incredibly useful when porting old web games to Steam.

[KramSurfer2]

Another major improvement that is needed, That I'm currently struggling with, is AIR's 1.7G memory limit. 

It would be great if AIR could address more memory.  4K images eat up memory quickly.

Also, it's a bit disheartening the lack of response to this thread.

[D-SuN]

MEDIUM and LOW quality settings in AIR for Desktop please. Games with heavy use of the display list perform much better on lower settings for Flash player, but in AIR only HIGH quality is available.

[georgefrankperry]

Adobe AIR is not dead. Some people get so pissy sometimes.

RandomReado​ ... Windows 64 bit was just added as a beta feature in the latest beta SDK....

You will find it under "64 bit AIR 25 SDK & Compiler Beta – Captive apps only (Windows)"

Download Adobe AIR 25 Beta - Adobe Labs

Chris said they are working on the "2017 and beyond" roadmap. So they could be including features planned for 2018+... that is not bad. Go look in the Starling thread and you'll get a better idea of what could be coming. A few of the requested features in that thread have been added already.

I agree that PR is by far the worst part of AIR. But honestly, it felt worse a few years ago... MUCH worse.

Adobe never added Stage3D support to Animate CC which was a big mistake, in my opinion. That could have grown the AIR platform and generated some revenue through Animate CC subscriptions. GAFMedia charges $1000 per year to use their tool professionally. No thanks.

All in all, I'm still very happy with the continued support for AIR. Adding new platforms as they come out (tvOS, Android TV) is a good sign for the future of the platform. Would love to see WatchKit and Android Wear support sometime this year.

[RandomReado]

According to the 64-bit release notes, Adobe has no plans to do a 64-bit runtime and that the runtime on Windows will remain 32-bit only.

[KramSurfer2]

They have a 64 bit run time available now for Windows.  with a packaging caveat that it not use the installed run time.

This is the EXACT issue this thread is talking about.  They don't really announce anything, they just post up stuff and let people find it themselves.  I simply decided to test this when I saw it on the Beta page.

So below is a simple application that creates 1920x1080 bitmaps and adds them to the display list.  200 per press.

In this snap, it has created 3189 bitmaps, 13.3 G's of images, utilizing 9.6G of system memory and paging properly.

GREAT JOB ADOBE TEAM.

https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashruntimes/air/win64SDK/air25_win64SDK_releasenotes.pd...

[rewb0rn]

I am not sure what you expect? A personal invitation? I for one am always happy to read through the latest version of the Air SDK Release Notes that usually contain this kind of information.

[KramSurfer2]

I would have liked 6 months to a year ago ( when they started 64bit for iOS), knowledge that this would be an option down the road.

Prior to this drop, all statements said 'Adobe has no plans to do a 64-bit runtime and that the runtime on Windows will remain 32-bit only.'
 
I've been experimenting with other frameworks to make applications as this has been a major problem for me creating interactive applications at 4K resolution.

I've likely waste over 100 hours the past year researching and experimenting with platforms I'll never look at again.

I'm SUPER stoked at this release, but it comes bitter sweet.

Now if I can just figure out how to make the ADL.exe use the 64-bit run time when I test/debug...