Adobe is bringing AIR—its rich Internet application platform—to mobile devices, offering a common development system for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS, as well as for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
A superset of Adobe Flash Player, AIR 2.5 allows developers to use Adobe’s Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder and Flex. To accommodate new mobile devices, AIR now supports accelerometers, geolocation, cameras, video, microphones, multi-touch and gestures. The new version can display native browser controls within an application, as well as support SQLite for storing and caching databases inside an AIR application.
“Our goal is for developers to reach multiple devices while leveraging a common platform and set of tools,” said Dave Gruber, group product marketing manager for Flex and Flash Builder.
In addition to AIR 2.5, Adobe introduced its own app store, called Adobe InMarket. Leveraging Adobe AIR, developers can sell their applications on app stores across different device types, such as those from Acer, Intel and others.
“With InMarket, we act as the middleman to help developers get connected to other app stores,” Gruber said. It helps developers expand their reach beyond core app stores, and helps providers reach developers as well, he added.
The company also previewed a release of Adobe Flash Builder, which adds capabilities for developers to build applications using familiar languages, components and tools. New features include creating and extending Flex applications for mobile devices, on-device debugging, coding tools to accelerate development, and more, Adobe said.
In addition, Adobe’s Eclipse-based Flash Builder IDE supports the ability to preview, deploy and profile mobile applications. Developers can also use an emulator to see how applications behave on different devices, Gruber said.
