Locked by Moderator, Not on subject anymore,AIR Roadmap Update

[chris.campbell]

Hello AIR developers,

With the news today regarding Flash Player, I'm sure many of you have questions regarding AIR and its future roadmap.  Let me start by saying that today's announcement was not about AIR, and instead focuses entirely on Flash Player and the browser plugin environment.  Adobe remains committed to AIR and we believe it continues to be a great desktop and mobile development platform.

Many of you have asked for a roadmap update.  We hope to have our official Flash Runtime roadmap updated soon, but until then I wanted to share some of the features we'd like to accomplish in our upcoming releases.  As always, this list may change as we receive feedback from the community.

• Support for 64-bit AIR – Windows Captive Only
• AIR SDK installer on Windows
• Desktop async texture upload
• DirectX11 support for AIR desktop
• Increase the GPU memory texture limit
• Improved monitor and resolution settings for AIR Desktop
• GPU render mode for AIR Desktop
• Support for the latest SDK on iOS 11 and Android O
• ASTC Support for mobile
• VR/AR support for AIR apps
• ANE support for Swift on iOS
• METAL bindings for Stage3D
• Motion detection for Android devices

We've also been following a feature request thread on the Starling forums.  We wanted to get your feedback on some of the items outlined by the community.  If you'd like to provide additional input, please take a minute and take this three question survey so we can better understand what folks would like to see in future releases.

Community AIR Feature Requests​ Survey

[TeotiGraphix]

Well as history has proven, not even regarding tech, if a language doesn't evolve it dies.

I'm just getting my last ROI with AS3 and I will just being doing C++, it is still evolving.

[zwetan_uk]

About AIR open source ... may I ask why? are you serious?

I mean when Adobe open sourced the avmplus, how many AS3 dev contributed exactly?

About close to none

When they open sourced Cross-Bridge, how many AS3 dev contributed exactly?

a handful of them maybe

When they open sourced WebkitAIR, how many AS3 dev contributed exactly?

How about zero

A project like Adobe AIR is hardcore C++, not just hard or complicated,

it is freaking hardcore and the code base is huge, and the edge cases

between the many different platforms can be extremely tricky to track down.

And just open sourcing Adobe AIR the "runtime" would not be enough

you would have to open source the ADL and ADT too, and so open source

the AIR SDK itself and the AOT compiler used to cross-compile to native iOS binaries.

I doubt that AS3 dev, even very advanced ones, would magically transform

into expert C++ cross-platform dev, I would say it is waaaaaaay above their head.

I'm pro open source, but really if the goal of open sourcing Adobe AIR

is for the "community" to take care of it, sorry but I see that as a big joke.

I have been working for about 10 years on Redtamarin, which is kind of a fork of avmplus,

the number of C++ contributions from AS3 dev amount to zero.

Software is not magic, it does not build itself, you actually need developpers writing code.

It is a bit insane to think "hey make that thing open source" and believe it gonna solve all the problems.

[User Unknow]

Most all AIR bugs concentrated not with AVM but with Native code. Opensourcing today will do nothing. But opensourcing 3-5 years ago could be great solution. When developers used AIR a lot...

For example I use Swift today for iOS development. But when I doing a lot of ANE's - i used Objective-C and ... for my projects I done more using Objective-C than in AIR. And after that I see that my projects uses 80% of native code in ANE's than AS3 in AVM.

For example I had few bugs/feature requests that could be fixed/implemented during 1-5 hours of work. But they are still not fixed/implemented after 5 years Opensourcing in this case could be better than "We have no time for this".

WebkitAIR ? ))) Lol what? )) They use CEF for all Creative Cloud projects but not for AIR. Why? Because lack of management. They are patching but not solving.

Crossbridge? Really? I playing with it a lot. And stopped. I don't see any profit because porting standalone to web was bad idea. Much faster was re-doing C++ code to AS3. But AVM so slow so this don't have any sense.

AVMPlus? ) Do you tried to build it? I know a lot of ppl who switched to Haxe because they have option to fix runtime.

[zwetan_uk]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Anton+Azarov  wrote

Most all AIR bugs concentrated not with AVM but with Native code. Opensourcing today will do nothing. But opensourcing 3-5 years ago could be great solution. When developers used AIR a lot...

For example I use Swift today for iOS development. But when I doing a lot of ANE's - i used Objective-C and ... for my projects I done more using Objective-C than in AIR. And after that I see that my projects uses 80% of native code in ANE's than AS3 in AVM.

My concern is not if a dev can produce code for his own project,

but in the case of an OSS project if a dev can contribute and share code with others

It's not only about your stuff, it's about the big picture

Anton AzarovFor example I had few bugs/feature requests that could be fixed/implemented during 1-5 hours of work. But they are still not fixed/implemented after 5 years Opensourcing in this case could be better than "We have no time for this".

You are underestimating, it takes much more than few hours.

It's not just the time to write the code, it's the time to test/support/maintain/etc.

on ALL the platforms.

Anton Azarov

AVMPlus? ) Do you tried to build it? I know a lot of ppl who switched to Haxe because they have option to fix runtime.

Well, not only I build it but I also extend it, see Redtamarin

Haxe can not "fix the runtime" because it target bytecode,

it does not modify the Flash or AIR runtime

[User Unknow]

You are underestimating, it takes much more than few hours.

It's not just the time to write the code, it's the time to test/support/maintain/etc.

on ALL the platforms.

(X) button for textfields on iOS (StageText) (Android also)

https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/AIR-3744753

Date Created: 04/17/2014

Implemented on 28 July 2016 !!!

If we could have access for Native side code - this can be added not more than 2 minutes. So this is why I made my own StageText for a project and spent 15 mins for this ANE. And I have a lot of similar examples.

Haxe can not "fix the runtime" because it target bytecode,

it does not modify the Flash or AIR runtime

I mean OpenFL target that outputs native instead of FP Runtime

[alevys]

Dear administration! Whether to wait for the official publication of the road map? We were planning to start a new project with Adobe Air, but without a new official road map no understanding of the situation. Answer something. How long should we wait?

[chaky]

Yes, please Adobe answer to this. Like any answer at all. If you are still working on a roadmap or not. Is it going to be any roadmap at all. Anything.

[Born2code]

Hi Chris Campbell,

Any news on when we can expect the latest AIR road map?

As you can see lots of guys waiting on it,

Thanks as always for the help and support,

Sean

[tidusf39939682]

What's going on? Is Adobe still working for AIR?

[dews]

Air 28 is up and check out the features!

For anyone to doubt the veracity of AIR as one of the top cross platform solutions out there - needs to take a look at what we now have available to us - Swift based ANEs anyone!

Very much looking forward to the roadmap and feeling secure in the knowledge we can build our APP confidently on AIR!

[Born2code]

this is awesome...!!!!!!!!!

looking fwd to the road map as well and very very excited!!!!

I also LOVE the fact Adobe is pushing on Android TV and Apple TV.

This is a HUGE + and its a game changer!!!!

Thank you Adobe,

Sean.

[KramSurfer2]

Swift based ANE's.  Very cool and useful for iOS integrations.

Wish we'd know a feature like that was on the horizon.   I've already recommended a different course of several projects that possibly could have been AIR had I known this option was actually in the works.  I know it's listed in your initial post of this long thread as something the team would like to do, but it's really frustrating just waiting four months to see what the team worked on be released as a surprise.

AIR is still my cross platform choice, just harder and harder to recommend with so many unknowns.

Thanks the 28 update, I'll be digging into it tonight!

[el111]

For anyone wishing to try their hand at Swift based ANEs, I ported FlashRuntimeExtensions to Swift over the past several months.

GitHub - tuarua/Swift-IOS-ANE: FlashRuntimeExtensions.swift. Example Air Native Extension written in...

Many thanks to Adobe for the work done on AIR 28 Beta.

[KramSurfer2]

el111 Thank you so much for this.  Great starting point! 🙂 

[PippoApps]

I am willing to pay a fee to Adobe for AIR SDK in order to support development. I am afraid that if revenues only come from CC Animate subscribers will not be enough for them to support the platform.

[JoãoCésar]

[Wall of text warning]

Well, heated or not, I'm learning a lot of AIR/AS3/Adobe/Flash Player/Animate CC/Starling/Feathers behind the scenes stuff with all this discussion.

I've been using Flash/Animate/AS3 for years, but never have been an active member of this or any other forum or community project of AS3/AIR related subject.

I think is undeniable that there is this "Flash is dead" ghost scaring developers everywhere, but reading all the comments here I'm more confident than ever that AS3 and AIR are still one of the best technologies to cross platform development, despite this annoying JavaScript frameworks flood and developers preconception.

Like it or not, code using AS3 nowadays makes you look some kind of noob-weirdo that is stuck in the past.

We know this is entirely false.

I've been using, testing and researching several frameworks/engines and what I'm seeing is that AIR development still has the best balance between easy of usage, power, and versatility. I don't have the expertise to say if Flash Player or AIR are really secure, but I can say that, as already pointed here, it's totally possible to create really, really great apps and games with Animate CC/AIR/AS3 with great performance for mobile or desktop.

My suggestions are:

- Adobe should really invest more on Animate CC. Bringing more features for game developers. This last update didn't add anything, unfortunately. Again, Animate CC is one-of-a-kind. It can draw like any other software, it can animate, and code. No other tool I ever tested can do this or at least can do this as Animate does. But, of course, as with any other tool, it can and must be improved with new features.

- Adobe should encourage add-ons extensions developers. I always see people asking for features in the forum that could easily be implemented with a JSFL script or with custom panels, but there are so many few doing this kind of stuff and most of what has been produced is really old. I'm developing, for example, a tool to make the creation of game tiles inside of Animate more easily. I want to create a panel to help designers code their games and apps. And so on. Is not that hard and there is a lot that can be done. But there are pratically no incentive.

- I'm not really a experienced programmer so I think using and coding ANEs are really difficult. Why is there no official Adobe ANEs to access all kind of features of Google Play, for example? I know there are some great websites producing ANEs, like MyFlashLabs and Milkman, but they are too expensive and many like me can't afford to buy all of those goodies. I'm developing a game for Android devices that I can't launch because I'm waiting for the AIR team to solve a conflict between two third party ANEs I'm using.

- Adobe NEEDS to tell us that it cares about AIR/AS3 developers. What happened on Adobe MAX to tell us this? Nothing. Animate has been updated and a single word hasn't been said about this in the main show. Adobe seems to be focusing on print, photo, video, and UX, but game development? Nah, forget it.

- This forum... Maybe it's because I didn't look further, but it seems to me to be more of a Q&A type. Where are the community production? Like any other technology forums, where are the developers showcasing their finalized works, WIPs, giving tips, working in collaborative projects, discussing related and random stuff? A strong community makes a strong product.

- The OpenFL and HaxeFlixel communities seem to be making a great work. Why not give official support to these guys? 

AIR, Animate, and AS3 are awesome, but underrated because of preconception, misinformation and lack of incentive.

[TeotiGraphix]

All so true, and all that has no answer.

Actually every point you have brought up some one else basically has in this thread. You seemed to get it all in one post.

IMHO being 1 developer. it's easy to justify "not using the coolest thing around" because I don't have to explain myself to anybody. So I continue to use AS3 and C++ native extensions to do my thing.

I tried researching other paths 2 years ago to give me the same cross dev experience with my audio apps, I came back to Feathers/Starling 2 times. Tried LIBGDX, no real strong UI framework, HTML5 haha yeah right performance and not a structure object graph, which for these types of UIs is fundamental.

I have been doing UI long enough to look at one and go, yeah that is HTML under the covers, I needed a UI not a browser html page.

I could also easily go to iOS with these apps but I am lazy right now, and that ease is because my UI/runtime is cross platform.

Being in a company or corporation, you are tied to the fad and not to reality, cold hard reality. Being independent you can use logic and reality and not have to justify your development decisions to people that want to say buzz words at the cost of development time.

All the issues you brought up are probably not going to be solved, my advice is do what you can and hope something changes. AIR is still getting updated, so it's good enough for now.

[ASWC]

You are correct, AIR is a great technology and there's nothing wrong with AS3 at all and you are also right this is all looked down by almost all other technology fields. I go to I360 every year and every time I say I still work with AIR and AS3 from time to time everybody laughs but nobody can explain why it's so laughable. So you nailed it, it's preconception and it's hurting AIR and AS3 real bad and I'm not confident this will recover ever. A few years back you could google "best cross platform technology" and find AIR in first place or close, now it is purposely removed from any list as if it doesn't exist. I said it in this thread before, I personally believe Adobe is sole responsible for all that.

[rewb0rn]

I agree on all posts, but mostly I would reiterate these points:

• Air needs better marketing by Adobe. It's one of the best (the best?) cross platform solutions, but no one knows about it.
• Adobe needs to make more money with Air to take it seriously again. Why not an official ANE market where they receive 30% revenue, similar to Unity asset store? What about additional licensing costs for serious developers like us? We are making good money with Air and we would be willing to pay higher fees to secure the future of the platform.
• Talking about it, a dedicated website for Air with marketing material, tutorials, said market, community forums with showcase categories, etc. would be really nice. The Adobe forums are not easily accessible and they leave a lot to wish for.
• Lately, bugs have not received the priority they should have. I finally see some long awaited bug fixes in Air 28 beta, but other bugs are still being ignored for years. So there is definitely room for improvement.
• Future platform support? HTML5, consoles, ... Well not gonna happen but as this is a wish list..

[ASWC]

That would be awesome and a game changer. I would go for a paid AIR PRO. I have tried about all cross platform tech out there from Unity to xamarin, ect ... And AIR is definitely still number one for me in term of versatility, power and ease of use but for how long? As I said, I check often cross platform articles and AIR is never mentioned anymore and that's really sad.

[IGZN]

This is nothing personal, just trying to reflect to some points that seem to be brought up frequently regarding how we see the future of AIR.

What about additional licensing costs for serious developers like us? ... we would be willing to pay higher fees...

Although it's not totally related, I'm paying 840 USD a year for my CC subscription which is already huge (I'm paying extra just because I reside in Europe – but it's a different story). Additionally, I can't see how making the entire ecosystem commercial would bring more and more developers on board. What's the point in it? To make more money for Adobe so they can keep the SDK alive? I think the result would be quite the opposite, losing more developers in the long run. And how should it work? Hundreds of questions.

Making it commercial is just a huge disadvantage compared to Android, Swift and the rest of the SDKs out there. The real power of AIR currently is (besides it's cross-platform) that it's free to use and a lot of additional layers are free/open source as well (Starling, Feathers etc).

The world is always changing, there are several things already in motion behind the curtains (Google is working on its new OS, voice controlled devices starting to gain market share etc), we don't know what the future holds for us, maybe Adobe doesn't either. Just an example, even if it looks impossible currently: What if next week Apple decides they're no longer allowing AIR apps in AppStore for whatever reason? All our paid license fees, our work, our dedication go down the drain.

The writing's on the wall. While the number of AIR developers is shrinking, weirdly there's more and more work for us, but it's in everyone's best interest to look for other opportunities. I give 24-36 months to AIR before it's announced that it's no longer being developed, only maintained.

[ASWC]

That seems a fair analysis unfortunately. As for Apple dropping AIR, while it's possible I don't see how they could do it without dropping also other third party like Unity and others, I think in a way all third party are protecting each others from that happening. They actually tried before, one week after the launch of Adobe Flash 5.5 (first one to allow Ios compilation) Apple dropped all third party just like that, they faced so much protest that they had to change back a week later.

[Colin Holgate]

There was a period where Apple denied tools that did not use Xcode from being in the store. Unity and some other tools do use Xcode for the publishing part, so they had a way around that. Fortunately, Apple eventually changed their position, and we all could use the tools we wanted again. I've programmed on 19 app in the various stores, and all of them were done with Flash Pro. I'm hopeful that things will stay are they are.

[IGZN]

Also, think of it this way (the numbers, equations are simplified for the sake of the conversation):

You're a small company with a handful of people, trying to make a mobile app for your local market or specific audience. Strictly because of financial purposes (as in you don't have that much money) you hire an AIR developer so you can cover both major mobile platforms. Besides paying your developer you still have to pay for Native Extensions (sometimes yearly licenses), there's some additional time required to finetune multiple ANEs (I could start telling stories how difficult is to include 10 ANEs and make sure they work perfectly on all platforms), but it comes with the territory, so you pay for these things as well.

The moment Adobe decides AIR is no longer free, you have to pay for these licenses as well, swapping to a commercial ecosystem can be costly (as in it takes time for your developer and the entire company to get familiar with how things work, updating old apps, purchasing licenses, software, whatever). From this point, it might no longer worth it to use a cross-platform solution (with all the headaches that come with it), so you might be better off with hiring an iOS and an Android developer, especially if you have plans to support more devices in the future (smart watches, android auto, who knows, both platforms give you opportunities that AIR can't).

Obviously, these are a little exaggerated examples, what I'm trying to point out is that the biggest advantage of AIR is also the biggest risk: it always has to be developed and maintained to make sure it's compatible with the newest OS versions, hardware, policies and whatnot. And this applies to apps developed with AIR as well. I see several posts, comments etc. where the developer claims that they're still using an older version of AIR, they simply can't bump the version, because the entire software falls apart, they can't afford to dedicate time for the upgrades. Imagine the same if they had to pay for AIR licenses as well.

[ASWC]

Yeah I totally agree, I guess we are just thinking out loud about bunch of solutions/ideas cos we really want AIR to stick around, bah we'll see but I'm ready for whatever. Here we do native Ios/Android (over 100 apps) but our main seller app publishes to all platform and is done with AIR, all our ane are done in house, now we have a code converter that exports to typescript for html5 compatibility but AIR is simply the best solution for the job, if it was only about Ios/Android we would just switch to xamarin. For a one code "publish to all" cross platform solution AIR is just unbeatable, nothing comes close, if it was to go eventually that would mean a ton load of extra work/headaches for me.