Adobe Releases Air 2.5 with Smartphone, Tablet and Television Support

"With the release of Air 2.5, more than three million Flash developers can now build a single game or application and easily deploy it across multiple application stores and devices," said David Wadhwani, Adobe's senior vice president of Creative and Interactive Solutions. "This is a huge step forward for developers looking to build rich, engaging applications but who have historically had to incur the cost of building them separately for each device and platform."

Adobe Air technology is supported on a range of devices, including smartphones and tablets which are running on platforms like iOS, Android and Blackberry, as well as PC-based operating systems like Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

Adobe AIR for Android

AIR developers will be able to upload AIR applications to the Android Market to be distributed for free or sold to users. These users will be able to download AIR applications just like any native Android application. If the AIR runtime is not already installed on the Android device, users will automatically be directed to download the AIR runtime from the Android Market. We are currently working with Android device OEMs to preinstall AIR to further improve the user experience.

Adobe AIR for TV

To make the optimizations in AIR 2.5 for TV available to developers, we added new APIs and enhanced others, including enhancements to the Keyboard APIs, the new StageVideo API, new Native Extension capabilities for hardware manufactures, and our new content protection solution called Flash Access 2.0. Flash Access enables content creators to deliver high value content right to the living room by having a protected delivery path from source to playback, including hardware security on the device using the device's hardware accelerated AES and RSA cores and secure key stores. By providing this high level of security, content creators and studios can have the comfort they need to delivery the highest-value Hollywood content directly over the Internet to a living room device.

With the introduction of AIR 2.5 for TV, Adobe is super excited to have Samsung as a launch partner, bringing the best platform for building rich content together with the largest TV and Blu-ray maker. Samsung is a leader in opening up the TV, starting with their Free the TV Developer Day in August 2010. Adobe has been working with Samsung throughout the year, porting and optimizing AIR for TV to run exceptionally well on their platform to allow developers to create best-in-breed applications. For developers to distribute their content, Samsung Apps is a platform that enables consumers to download and purchase applications on their TVs and Blu-ray players that come from many sources and use many technologies. Note that Samsung Apps is also connected to the Adobe InMarket service, which gives Flash and AIR developers a one-stop-shop to distribute their content to all the different platforms and devices that are enabled by Adobe AIR.

ADC article Optimizing Video and Content for Flash Platform on TV.

The impact of the new Air platform will be felt, especially as more and more devices begin to enable Flash. Already one of the top free apps on Android Market, Flash for Android brings rich Flash based content to mobile devices inside the browser.

New Adobe AIR Desktop Features

1. CSS @font-face support
2. CSS shadow support.
3. StageWebView
4. H.264 video hardware decoding for Windows.