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

[dews]

We - along with thousands of other teams worldwide - have finally crossed that line for the first time, and successfully launched both an Android and iOS release because of AIR.

We're using raw sockets, remoting, p2p, encrypted local db, encrypted storage, native code using ANEs for deviceCheck, Attestation and Verify Apps, Social Network integration, analytics and push notification with bi-directional threads handling image manipulation and large data management, and wirelessly connected microcontrollers. We're rendering our interface directly to the GPU so our UI transitions between views, scrolls lists and so much more as smoothly as any native UI and supported on every phone factor display. Starling and Feathers have finally brought all that Flex could have been - all that it wanted to be - to life, right on the GPU. We have development scalability with battle tested MVC framework Robotlegs -- ALL with NO FEAR of a need to refactor because of underlying platform changes. We can do SO MUCH so solidly, on a single code base and now with swift support, the same family of languages - I almost feel guilty when talking to other developers going through the nightmare of a young technology. Slight smirk at the native developers!

AIR was once the goto platform for Enterprises everywhere...  Criminals began focussing on the billion+ potential victims that Flash offered and along came Jobs...  AIR and Flash were thrown into the same hell, demonized and ridiculed..  nothing could have stood up to that onslaught.

That was the beginning of the end - we've just smashed through the end - and started a whole new beginning and it's called AIR 30!

I just wanted to THANK the company and the brilliance that have made this possible for all of us developers - stand up and feel the LOVE!  THANK YOU!!

[Frédéric C.]

Thanks for sharing. I agree, AIR is totally awesome, and I still have to find a better option that matches all my needs (and there are many). I actually tried to find one, but without success. AIR rulez!

[ASWC]

AIR is still the best cross platform solution, nothing compares, but I said it many times I'm really concerned about Adobe commitment to it and as a result, its future.

I invite all AIR developers committed to that platform to pledge to Adobe their willingness to accept a PAID version of AIR so that Adobe can allocate the resources necessary for the further development of that platform.

[PippoApps]

No doubt.

Adobe needs to make money out of AIR, and we are all willing to pay.

[mattr8755445]

I agree with the guys above.
I'll be happy to pay for AIR if Adobe shows a commitment to adding the new features that we need, especially when it comes to making Desktop games, not just mobile, which seems to be their focus now. Currently Flash content is still more optimised on mobile than it is on Desktop, which is absurd, considering the huge indie game market on PC.

[zwetan_uk]

mattr8755445  wrote

I agree with the guys above.
I'll be happy to pay for AIR if Adobe shows a commitment to adding the new features that we need, especially when it comes to making Desktop games, not just mobile, which seems to be their focus now. Currently Flash content is still more optimised on mobile than it is on Desktop, which is absurd, considering the huge indie game market on PC.

if?

especially when it come to desktop?

have you seen the last AIR 29 SDK features?

64-bit, enhanced profile, vertex texture fetch, disable/enable vsync, increase GPU memory limit, etc.

all those were for desktop profile

[chaky]

I have to agree with zwetan_uk on this. AIR for desktop is pretty solid now. Only BIG feature that is missing is changing display resolution at runtime.

[mattr8755445]

In particular I'm referring to Stage Quality options and GPU support for bitmaps in the old display list - these both exist on mobile but not Desktop. These features would be incredibly useful for preserving/porting old Flash games to Desktop, and have been requested by many developers for years. Yes there's some odd workarounds for these problems, but traditional Flash content still runs better on mobile, unless I've missed some recent developments, in which case I digress.

[Colin Holgate]

I don't agree with this part. Publishing to AIR is a reason a lot of people pay a monthly CC subscription. The better features AIR has, the more sets of CC money Adobe will get. That should be enough. Either that or completely scrap the subscription model and go back to where you only pay for the features you use. I think Adobe wouldn't want that.

[Joseph_Saade]

Yes I pay a CC subscription and use air extensively.

via animate and FB. Maybe we should have some kind of better IDE but that is another topic.

[PippoApps]

And maybe update FB, stuck at 4.7 since last decade

I can't see it in the list of apps in CC...

[Colin Holgate]

You have to scroll down the list of CC apps. It's not due to be updated, and the Flex aspect of Flash Builder was made Apache open source. Maybe that's had more development?

[PippoApps]

Strangely it is not in my list... anyway I didn't enjoy FB then and I still use good old FlashDevelop... I plan to move to IntelliJ but I am procrastinating.

Anyway AIR rocks. Our concern is only to make sure Adobe keeps maintaining it, and also a bit of marketing wouldn't hurt. If you look on the web for cross-platform SDKs most of the time AIR is not even mentioned! That is really painful since it is the de facto best cross-platform environment ever.

[PippoApps]

Colin are you sure?

You can easily package AIR apps using only third party software. I.e. IntelliJ and AIR SDK.

I personally enjoy packaging with Animate CC in order to leverage the versatility of vector sources, but it seems most people out there use ADT directly.

[Colin Holgate]

That's a good point. I'm an Animate user, and sometimes forget about the more painful Eclipse based ways of developing! Isn't it usually the case though that you use Animate or Flash Pro to create the assets, that your Eclipse IDE then builds from?

In the cases where you can achieve everything without paying Adobe anything, then yes, AIR could be its own monthly subscription, or it could be part of Animate's monthly subscription, even if you end up not using other features of Animate.

[dews]

We're still pre-funding but I think the best thing we can do is create successful apps that generate high paying jobs for our community.  Financially support the teams and projects that contribute to our community - encourage the developers we work with to contribute to our forums to help new developers.  Look at what Angry Birds did for Starling - let's spread the word and as Colin says ensure that Adobe is adding subscriptions because of us.

Desktop and Mobile APP development is where it's at.  Web apps are inherently flawed because you will never be able to do what you can do with a desktop or mobile app - once Flash is finally put to rest and out of the flames AIR can rise again - the future looks bright for us!

[ASWC]

I'm forced to do HTML5 development to replace our old web based flash apps, been doing it for about 2 years now and despite HTML5 having big flows for sure, it's got a few features that are better or as good as flash was. The WebAudioAPI for example, flash doesn't compare, not even close, I wish flash has a audio API that good! (I wish AIR had one too ....)

[JoãoCésar]

WOW! This is excellent!

These are great news for the entire community.

Is there a link for us to help spread the word?

And I also hope you can share tips and tricks about the development in a near future.

Regards,

JC

[KramSurfer2]

ASWC : Yes, the browser implementions of the HTML5 spec have finally copied all the functionallity of FLASH in 2002

I like the positive vibe here.  I agree it's the best and easiest way to do cross plateform and I love it.

But realitiy is; not even the adobe website's list of applications is there a 'software development tool.'

Infact they don't list any thing for app development on their site.

Animate is described as a way to make web animations.

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/catalog/desktop.html

Air 30 - 64 bit only is a way to thin the herd of developers.

I would guess supporting the ever changing software development enviroment is alot more expensive than adding a feature or two to After Effects every year and selling the same image over and over to photoshop users.  It's about bottom line and supporting software delevopers is expensive.

Also missing from their main site is anything about the PhoneGap enviroment they bought.

Between the lines.   Read.

[ASWC]

Can't agree more, the commitment of Adobe to AIR platform future is concerning to me at least.

True, it took HTML5 10 years+ to finally reach (webgl aside) Flash8/9 level, guessing another 10 years will be needed to reach Flash 11. But hey we all know Flash died not because there was anything wrong with it but because all major companies (with Adobe's blessing) conspired to make it die. But reality is that, so now I do HTML5 cos I wanna keep my job.

[PippoApps]

True, it is really obscure Adobe's attitude towards AIR. On one side they do not promote it in any way. On the other side AIR team, albeit small, is doing an amazing job (BTW, they confirmed AIR30 will include again 32bit apps, and they will not move to 64bit only until Apple forces developers to). I stick to AIR also because I have my 15 years worth of work framework that allows me to do amazing stuff in no time. It would be nice if Adobe at corporate level shares with us long term plans for this amazing technology. Or maybe, considering how Adobe management quality and vision deteriorated in the last decade, it's better AIR stays under their radar or they would kill it completely in order to save a little cash ahahah

[DanStarlight]

The survival of AIR is critical to me. After 10 years programming Flash is still the best framework I know of.

Html5 is close to where Flash was in the early 2000s.  Unity3D defeats Flash in 3D, but their 2D environment is still very far from it.

In my opinion there are very few weaknesses:

1) Html5 / StageWebView

Flash is end-of-life in the browser.  This means a replacement is critical, which is why AIR needs to render Html perferfectly.

StageWebView is a weak replacement for browsers. Many pages don't load correctly. Some ANEs do a good job, like the RichWebView by MyFlashLabs, but still not perfect.

If Adobe purchased or built a browser that would provide full support for Flash this could also be a solution.

2) Video codec support

It seems kind of natural to want to playback any video.  I particularly think there is a big advantage to being able to play back videos recorded with the mobile camera.

3) Give life back to Flash games

There are so many amazing games that have disappeared from the internet over the years.  It wouldn't take much to allow people to play them on Android.

If a person uses StageWebView to open a site with Flash content then AIR should automatically become responsible for opening swf files which should be opened by html.

There are few problems following this.  Sometimes there needs to be access to Flashvars and javascript.  Other than that the only serious problem is that Security.allowDomain(...) causes a critical error.  A lot of the time this code isn't even needed in the game.  If this was simply a warning and the code was ignored this would mean most games would run correctly.

Controlling some of these classic games with touch could still be tricky, but it would be easy to create solutions.  Add-ons could be created to give gamepad support, and controls could be added over the swf.

Essentially StageWebView could turn AIR into a full blown browser for Flash content.

In my opinion the main reason Apple and Google killed Flash off in the browser is so that people would buy their apps in the stores.  Personally I think the internet without Flash games will be a much more boring place - especially if you think about what AIR will be capable of in another 10 years...

[DaveCates]

Any update on this? A new roadmap would be ace before we all start having to jump onto naff systems such as React Native...losing 20+ years of ace cross-platform development progress....yuk

[ZachBJ]

If Adobe made WebAssembly aka WASM as one of target output, I'd like to say: CONGRATS YOU SAVE FLASH.

We don't need HTML/JS/CSS target as it is being developed actively on Apache Royale and Anmate can export to Canvas+WebGL.

BUT WASM support directly from AIR SDK is a big win. We don't need a full support at a row, at least beta/experimental support is enough so devs can test and report for future release and improvements.

It is a SHAME if Adobe did not invest AIR on WASM. Because even language like Go has official support for WASM.

Flash API is rich, again it is a shame if Adobe did not come to the party.

Please support WASM from now on, and make the internet "Rich" again.

[dews]

AR/VR support = AMAZING -- huge for AIR -- no end of applications

..and these are already on the list Chris wrote - so we're not panicking.

..that said, a super positive updated roadmap would be nice!