Not content with giving us lucky people Flash Player 10.1, Adobe has also very generously announced the release of AIR 2.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Billed as the most significant update of AIR since its original release, it consists of dozens of new features and hundreds of new APIs for developers to take advantage of. The AIR runtime itself has also been overhauled, which means your AIR apps (including existing ones) will use less CPU and consume 30% less memory.
Over the past two years AIR has evolved into one of the best platforms for giving developers the easiest and most powerful way to develop desktop applications across multiple platforms. Some of AIR 2.0’s new features include:
- Enhanced support for interacting with printers.
- Support for TLS/SSL socket communication.
- Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
- Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
- Support for native code integration.
- The ability to open a file with its default application.
- Multi-touch and gesture support.
- New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
- WebKit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
- Global error handling.
- Improved cross-platform printing.
- Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.
Those wondering about Adobe’s commitment to mobile will be pleased to know that AIR 2.0 for Android will also be released soon and should over the coming years help phase out Flash Lite, which has traditionally been used for Flash application development on mobile.
Download AIR 2.0 here and if you’re interested you can find a more comprehensive list of new features at the Adobe AIR Team Blog.
You should mention that you can grab Air 2 for Android at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/ 🙂
The Webkit thing is interesting. I noticed that Adobe disabled the stuff that competes overtly with Flash, citing some rather flimsy excuses 😉