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Hi Anton,
That touches a bit another issue regarding AIR's marketing.
I also don't think I've seen this one in the gaming showcase on adobe's site, so I guess if you have a list of cool games out there you sould be updating more often as some of us want to use it as a guide when peaching projects to clients.
One clever thing Unity did was adding their logo in the games from their free version.
Do you think that giving an incentive to developers to add the AIR logo (or a new sexier 
) in some of their apps would help people realise more that Flash and AIR is still around and kicking?
That goes two ways, I'm not waiting from Adobe to say, in my next mobile game I'm adding it (not sure yet if it's going to be as intrusive as a splash screen but maybe in the credits... I'm not advertising for free ).
In the end is all about the marketing and if I have one complaint for Adobe that is poor marketing in the most tough era for Flash and AIR devs.
We can build amazing casual games with only the half of the features AIR gives us but we need Adobe to make a bold statement outside our circles that Flash and AIR are here to stay so that clients are not scared away the first time they meet another HTML5 prophet.
Cheers
I keep reading this thread despite the fact that there won't be any clear answer or conclusion.
But I must say that there are a few very clear and adequate questions being asked with no response to them. 72Pantera, Jean-Marc and even Joseph Labreque asked a few important things not being answered. Everybody else are just playing some childish game of "I'm right, and you're not".
I truly agree, that this ten pointed roadmap is not enough. Jean-Marc talked through it very clearly and I praise him for that.
Having concurrency for iOS is a must, since now you can't really port your code cross platform - you must think of the core as not all features are available for all platforms. I think it's honest to say that this "great new features" is the fix for the half-baked one provided early on. It's something like the Stage3D, that has tons of limitations that people ask to be fixed.
And I have to be honest - I think that Adobe are trying to fake productivity with things like "Supplementary character enhancement support for the TextField control". Instead, I would LOVE to switch Stage3D and StageVideo, please!
I my opinion, that's the real problem and that's what the discussion is about - the great features/fixes that are neaded are dropped, and new improvements are done instead. I would love Adobe to spend one year in development to support publishing on Windows 8, instead of releasing packaging reduction for iOS (thank you for saving me those 4 minutes for product build, it's almost the same as I can build build on more platforms).
I think Adobe are just improving some of the old and not well working features, instead of providing new ones. I still need NativeExtensions for 80% of the mobile things I need, and the other 20% have real issues.
I know you're saying "stop complaining as you've got workaround - just make those extensions!". But thank you, I would love to stick to AS development and not learn new languages nor hire people to develop what is needed. It's a workaround, yes, but I started wondering if it's worth enough.
Adobe stuff, please answer Joseph's and Jean-Marc's questions. That would be the real client communication you are talking about, and all the "trust us we work alot", and "I work for Adobe for 18 years" is just dust in the eyes. Answer those questions so we can sleep tight 
Yes I think that Adobe will continue developing the platform and indeed the key question is how much and how quick.
I think that the only way we can expect major changes in that is if for any reason the mindset around AIR changes and more companies and people support it.
It's a bit like the chicken and the egg, should companies support and evangelise AIR in good faith or should Adobe boldly risk some money for development and marketing? IMHO for big corporations as Adobe it should be the latter.
Regarding the ANEs, I honestly can't see which functionality could go in the core of AIR. I mean how would they prioritise what to include and what not? I might use the gyroscope in every app I make but the other fella might only need camera roll access which I never need for instance...
If they finaly put all of this functionality in the AIR core and Apple decides to make X change and Android Y change we would have to wait until the next AIR release to have those changes, now the vendors of ANEs react much faster to those changes and if they fail we can build or outsource the development of the ANEs. When spending money for ANEs (I never needed to yet) just consider how much money the Untity devs spend in the assets store for plugins without complaining... no one asks from Unity to cover all that in the core of their technology and no one should imo.
To me it makes no sense to have a heavyweight core for AIR, I like more the modularity that gives me the choice. Maybe what's missing is more of Adobe's contribution to the ANEs market (even paid ones).
But in anycase I think that what we all get is that indeed resources are scarce 
. On the bright side maybe by the time Adobe stops supporting AIR, some other technology (maybe HTML5 at that point with ES5) is as mature and the transition would be almost seamless.
Hello guys,
I would like to share my humble opinion and experience with you related the topic. I'm working with flash and actionscript for the last 10 years. I've done everything from simple banner animations to complex websites and games. I've had a lot of trouble in some cases as most of you of course but I've grown to love the platform very very much. So as expected when I read the posts about the death of flash some years ago I was devastated. Until I read what was the case exactly... Adobe have stopped the support the support for mobile browsers for the flash player... I was like 'Who cares???'. Nobody was doing flash for mobile anyway. At the point the AIR platform was already on its way to mobile and that's where I was looking at. So I didn't really paid much attention to the 'death' news and kept digging and working with Adobe AIR. At first I had some worries about the performance. It was terrible and I really had my doubts about the future of flash. Then Stage3D appeared (not without a huge effort from Adobe as you might imagine) and the sun was shining again. Then Starling and Feathers came and some other VERY WELL maintained frameworks. So I've started playing with it. We even got an order to create an Android version of one of their games (not very complicated but lots of animations and gestures). We did it in AIR. The result was a perfectly running game with amazing performance on every device we have tested it on. What was interesting for me was to give the client the iOS version from our AIR build and compare it to their native one - the game was running so much smoother nobody could believe it. Of course the native app was not very well created and such but the point still stands. Since that moment we have started doing most of our mobile business apps and games on AIR. We do have some native apps because of clients requests but still I see no point in that. Currently we have three very big games close to release that are completely created on AIR + Native Extensions. All of them will be release at the same time for iOS phones and tablets, Android phones and tablets and Web in a single code base with some compiler conditions in the different modules. There were some problems and some bugs on various devices but nothing so far we couldn't overcome will a bit of brainstorming and some well planned coding. There is NO SINGLE FEATURE to this point of the development that we couldn't do. Nothing seen on other games cannot be done. We have in-app payments, social integration, tons of animations, amazing graphics, great particle effects and lots more. The memory management was tricky but not impossible. The game currently runs pretty well even on iPhone 3GS... I promise to share the games as soon as they are release in the next few weeks so you can understand my point completely.
So to generalize my point of view here:
1. AIR is far from dead because at the moment it's one of the best cross platform technologies especially for games.
2. It is true that the last few updates of the platform were not something spectacular but they fixed some problematic limitations and gave us a much more stable framework. The truth is at the moment there's not THAT MUCH stuff to add. There are missing features and problematic stuff (like the video playback for certain formats) but there are ways to make them work very well even now. There's nothing extremely new to the native sdks too. No big new features that someone would NEED in their app. And if there is a simple native extension is a much faster approach then doing the app/game in three different languages.
3. On the Flash side - for games flash is the KING and that's a fact. There are literally millions of flash games on the market and every new game we see on facebook or other gaming sites is Flash. Yeah I have seen Angry Birds done in HTML5. But there are few people in the world who can do that kind of HTML5.
4. There are some features in an app or a game that are times easier to be done in AIR than native. I have knowledge and experience in both Objective-C and Java and I have done some nice stuff there but there were moments I would have killed myself over something that would take me hours to do native but I could have done for 10 minutes in AIR.
5. ALTERNATIVES:
- Native - much slower, can't really see why I should choose it unless the whole app I have to make is build on extremely native functionalities. For iOS I would need to by a Mac machine.
- Unity - great platform I would say. BUT for 3D and for big GAMES. To create a small 2D game with Unity instead of Flash would take much more time and nerves. It is paid.
- Titanium - good for small business apps that have nothing unusual. It is extremely ease to use for this type of projects and a great alternative. But for something more complicated you'll get stuck. There are limitations that won't allow you to make anything you want to. Also not very good for games. As far as I remember - it's free.
- Corona - I don't have any experience with this one but as far as I have read pretty much the same case as Titanium.
- HTML5 - for me to say that HTML5 is anything close to AIR is a complete joke. This is my opinion. It is great for new interactive and interesting animated websites for all platforms. And that's about it. It has major performance issues. It's impossible to make anything work fine on every possible device, browser and OS. Even if you do it will take weeks and huge amount of cheating in the code with tons of if/else statements for each platform. Creating big complicated games with HTML5 is close to impossible for the regular developer and it is extremely hard to provide decent security, stability and bug free environment overall.
So at the end at that point Adobe AIR is the ultimate cross-platform solution for me. Of course that's my opinion and everyone is free to use whatever they want. But I just wanted to point the reasons I love the platform and why I'll keep using it for the years to come.
Have a great day you all and build amazing apps and games no matter what you use
Ico
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