FLEX{er} » AIR

Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 Launched

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:23:21 +0000

Now that MAX 2011 Conference is started, Adobe just launched the Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. Take a look at the features introduced by each of them.

Flash Player 11 features

Native 64-bit support (Flash Player desktop)
Stage 3D accelerated graphics rendering
Adobe Flash Access content protection support for mobile
Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) support
G.711 audio compression for telephony
Garbage collection advice
Cubic Bézier curves
Secure random number generator
Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Flash Access enhancements
TLS secure sockets support (new for Flash Player)
Socket progress events
Native text input UI (mobile)
JPEG-XR support
Enhanced high-resolution bitmap support
High-efficiency SWF compression support
DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying
Sound.loadCompressedDataFromByteArray and Sound.loadPCMFromByteArray
Asynchronous bitmap decoding

Test if you have Flash Player 11 installed here: http://blogs.adobe.com/sunil/2011/10/04/test/.

Get Adobe Flash Player 11 from here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

If you look for the debugger version of Flash Player 11 go to this link: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

AIR 3 features

Stage3D (desktop only)
Native extensions (all platforms)
Android Market licensing integration (Android only, obviously)
Captive runtime bundles (Android and desktop)
Background audio playback (new feature in iOS; already works on Android)
CameraRoll support for iPad
Hardware-accelerated video (mobile)
Native text fields (mobile)
Front-facing camera support (iOS and Android)
Mobile-encrypted local storage (brings feature parity between desktop and mobile)
Device speaker control (mobile)
Native JSON support (mobile and desktop)
Socket improvements (mobile and desktop)
H.264 video encoding (desktop only)
JPEG XR support (mobile and desktop)
Higher resolution bitmaps (mobile and desktop)
Multichannel audio digital output (AIR for TV only)
Advanced controller support (AIR for TV only)
More easily removing all children from a container (all platforms)
More easily determine if a MovieClip is playing (all platforms)
Secure random number generation (mobile and desktop)
Support for cubic bezier curves (all platforms)

Get Adobe AIR 3 from here: http://get.adobe.com/air/

The features were only listed. Read more bellow to find put more about each feature…
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/10/adobe-flash-player-11-air-11-available-later-today.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/whats-new-flash-player11.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air3_whatsnew.html

What’s New in Adobe AIR 2.6

Andrei Ionescu — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:07:36 +0000

A while ago Adobe has release AIR 2.6 for Android, iOS and desktop. These are the new things in AIR 2.6:

Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding. This features allows bitmaps to optionally be decoded in another thread as opposed to on-demand in the main thread.
Owned Windows. The use case for owned windows is primarily things like tool palettes.
Bitmap Capture in StageWebView. The new drawViewPortToBitmapData function on StageWebView lets you draw the view port of a StageWebView to a bitmap.
Microphone support on iOS. The Microphone APIs now work on iOS.
StageWebView on iOS. Just like on Android, the StageWebView now works on iOS.
Multitasking on iOS. With 2.6, AIR applications will get activate and deactivate events on iOS as users switch to and from the app. AIR applications will also be properly resumed rather than restarted (unless the OS has decided to kill it for some reason which both iOS and Android reserve the right to do for any application).
Retina Support on iOS. Pretty self-explanatory. 2.6 has support for the very high-resolution iPhone 4 and iPod touch screens (326 PPI), and the higher resolution application icons.
iOS Camera, CameraUI, and CameraRoll Support. The Camera and CameraUI APIs are now supported on iOS, just like on Android.
Improved hardware acceleration on iOS. Hardware acceleration on iOS now works like it does on Android, and generally provides much better performance than with PFI. And speaking of PFI…
PFI is now ADT. The PFI (Packager for iPhone) utility is gone, and its functionality has been integrated into ADT. ADT can now be used to package AIR files, native desktop installers, Android applications, and iOS apps. I should also mention that iOS applications (IPA files) can be built and copied to iOS devices on Windows using ADT and iTunes. Very slick.
Configurable panning with soft keyboard activation. When a text field receives focus in an AIR application on a mobile device, the soft keyboard is generally shown, and if the keyboard covers the text field, the UI is automatically panned so that the text field isn’t obscured.
Programmatic control of the display of the on-screen keyboard.
Support for the Amazon Android Market. AIR applications built with the AIR 2.6 SDK can be distributed on the new Amazon Appstore for Android.
Vector printing on Linux. If you can get your printer to work on Linux, you can now get vector printing in AIR.
Native cursor support. This is a big one. With AIR 2.6, developers have access to real native cursors. The new MouseCursorData class takes one or more bitmaps and a hotSpot Point, and creates an actual native cursor.
On-device debugging over USB (Android only). No more wrestling with WiFi debugging. Mobile Android apps can now be debugged over USB.
Native Menu event refinement.
Enhanced text support on Android. Another big one. AIR 2.6 has support for scrolling, text selection, and text context menus (for cut/copy/paste) on Android.
NetConnection.httpIdleTimeout. In AIR 2, we added the URLRequest.idleTimeout and URLRequestDefaults.idleTimeout properties. In AIR 2.6, we’re adding similar support to NetConnection with the new httpIdleTimeout property.
Bundled Android USB drivers on Windows.
Support for the vipaccess:// URI. The vipaccess:// URI for invoking VeriSign’s VIP Access application is now white-listed in AIR.
-version flag for ADT. Running ADT with the -version flag will now return the version of ADT.

Adobe® AIR® and Adobe Flash® Player Incubator – Flash Player 11 Available

Andrei Ionescu — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:33:57 +0000

The Adobe® AIR® and Adobe Flash® Player Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages. Test the bleeding-edge capabilities of runtimes and contribute to the future of the Flash Platform. Please note that the capabilities in the Incubator builds may or may not be supported in future releases of the runtimes.

Adobe Flash Player 11 Incubator can be downloaded from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplatformruntimes_incubator.html and debug versions are also available.

The main thing added in Flash Player 11 Incubator is “Molehill” 3D APIs for Flash Player and AIR which is a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Adobe Flash Platform runtimes.

This is a video to see what’s about “Molehill”:

To test the new 3D capabilities of Flash Player 11 Incubator see:

Two New Apps with Multi-Screen Experince

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:16:20 +0000

Last two week I seen two great applications that make use of multi-screen experience capabilities of Flash Platform.

Androideroids by Grant Skinner
Desktop MP3 Music Player by Mihai Corlan

The first is a prototype multiplayer asteroids game in which each player uses an Android phone as their game controller. The player connects to the game and on the main screen he can see 3rd person view of the whole game while in the same time he can see the 1st person view on their Android phones.

The second one is a mp3 player that can be controlled by any numbers of Android phones. Mihai did the application using AIR and Flex Framework. The communication between the remote controls (AIR apps running on Android phones) and desktop player is done using the peer to peer features of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1.

Demos of the running application can be found on each of the application pages. So take a look at them.

These two applications show the power of the Flash Platform for all types of devices: Computers, TVs, Phones, etc.

Enjoy!

AIR 2.0 Is Now Available!

Andrei Ionescu — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:56:00 +0000

Yesterday, Adobe has released AIR 2.0 runtime and can be downloaded at get.adobe.com/air/.

The new things in AIR 2.0 are:

New Webkit with additional HTML5 and CSS3 support
Multitouch and gestures
Enhanced drag-and-drop support
Enhanced socket support
Enhanced printer interaction
DNS resolution
Local microphone API
Native document handlers to open document
Native process APIs
Native installer
Socket servers and peer-to-peer networking
TLS/SSL sockets
UDP networking support
Global error handler
IPv6 network support

I named just a few changes but there are a lot more, so please read the release notes.

If you to know even more read the Adobe AIR Team Blog article about the new AIR 2.0 at http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2010/06/introducing_air_2.html

Moving Forward – in Reply to – Thoughts on Flash

Andrei Ionescu — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:25:35 +0000

Yesterday Steve Jobs posted an article on their website named Thoughts on flash where he expresses his motives for banning Adobe’s well known runtimes from any of their products. In response to Steve’s article, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, in his Moving forward article, stated that Adobe is moving forward concentrating on the Android platform. In the near future Adobe and Google will present (as a public preview) at Google I/O conference a new version of Android with Flash 10.1, and after that, more and more flash enabled devices will emerge. Kevin is not trying to dismantle Steve’s arguments because that was done a week ago by Mike Chambers article but only to let us know that Adobe’s future developments will not include iPad, iPhone and the new iPad.

Adobe AIR 2.0 Beta 2 Released

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:21:13 +0000

Today, 2nd of February 2010 Adobe did launch Adobe AIR 2.0 beta 2. The first beta release of AIR 2 was in November 2009 and after 3 months Adobe AIR 2.0 is almost ready for release. Good job AIR team!

Some features and enhancement:

Print Job Enhancements – better control of the way content is printed from an AIR application
TLS/SSL sockets – TLSv1, SSLv3
Flash Access support
IME API/IME Text Input Enhancements
AIRCore framework – service monitoring and URL file promise classes

Go to official AIR 2.0 page and read the release notes, the FAQ and download the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime and SDK. Along with all these read the announcement on the Adobe AIR Team Blog and test the samples.

Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 1 will not run using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 1 application to run on the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime, the namespace of the beta 1 application descriptor file must first be updated to “2.0beta2″ and compiled against the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK.

Adobe AIR 1.5.3 Released

Andrei Ionescu — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:50:57 +0000

On 8th of December 2009 Adobe did release Adobe AIR 1.5.3. This new version includes:

updated version of Flash Player
security updates
bug fixes

Both the runtime and the SDK are available for download. Please read the developer release notes which include critical information that all developers building AIR applications should be sure to read including important information related to certificate renewals as well as bug fixes. Read also the article on Adobe AIR blog.

Localized versions of the release notes for both developers and end users are also available.

We wish you happy coding and development.

Webinar: using PHP and Flash for developing Rich Internet Applications

Stelian Crisan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:57:11 +0000

Our friend, Mihai Corlan, will host an e-seminar about PHP and Flash Platform, but let me quote him:

“On December 2nd, together with Roy Ganor from Zend Company, I will host an e-seminar about PHP and Flash Platform. We will show you how you can create a Rich Internet Application using the Flex framework, Illustrator, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder 4. Then we will show you how to connect the Flex application to a PHP backend and how easy is to debug the PHP and Flex code using Zend Studio 7.1 and Flash Builder 4.”

For more informations and registration procedure please read Mihai’s article at www.corlan.org.

Adobe AIR Challenge final is over

Andrei Ionescu — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:59:43 +0000

In the last months Adobe AIR Challenge has been taking place. Yesterday we had the final: 3 AIR applications fought for the prizes. Those applications where:

Flair Builder – Cristi Pascu
MiniBuilder – Victor Dramba
Phitodo – Alexandru Ghiura

All three applications did win at least one prize on a category… and the categories where:

User experience and Design
Application Architecture
Novelty/Innovation
Value of the product

The prizes where big but also the applications were great:

One 13″ Mac Book
One iPod Touch
Four Creative Suite Web Premium

But before announcing the winners, Mihai Corlan has been speaking about the newly launched Adobe AIR 2.0 beta version with its new features. Adobe’s user experience designer did give us some advices on how to implement user centered applications. See some images bellow…

Mihai Corlan

And… the big winner is… Cristian Pascu with Flair Builder. He won the Mac Book and 2 licenses of Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium. But all three final applications where great.

More about the Adobe AIR Challenge in the following articles:
http://myadobe.ro/2009/11/24/au-venit-si-premiile-adobe-air-challenge/
http://myadobe.ro/2009/11/18/air-challenge-vino-la-finala/
http://myadobe.ro/2009/11/03/adobe-air-challenge-proiecte-finale/
http://myadobe.ro/2009/07/30/formularul-de-inscriere-pentru-air-challenge/
http://myadobe.ro/2009/07/27/adobe-air-challenge/
http://myadobe.ro/air-challenge/