"Hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding is supported on some video cards and drivers running on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Linux and Mac OS X hardware-accelerated decoding is not supported in this version."

Nice, gr8 to see some of the much awaited features being added with this version of AIR.
However, I would like to see API's for communicating with the Serial/Parallel ports through Adobe AIR.
Strangely I dont see any such thing being talked about.

Hi

Great work team air!!! Now please port this to the mobile platform and make it multithreaded. You guys can bury java in the ground with this.

@huzefa I think you can now easily bundle a small C++ program with your air application for serial port access.

Good stuff! Going to wait until the linux 64bit one ;)

i can't find any reason why adobe still doesn't allow publishing AIR apps to _simple_ standalone executables.

lets be fair - downloading/distributing and installing 'air runtime', installing 'air app' doesn't make sense in 9 of 10 times and is just bad experience and time waste for end user.

air2 introduced 'standalone installers' - why it happens to be so lame? you just made native executable file from '.air' that only checks if 'air runtime' is installed and further works similar to v1.

is there some secret and genius idea why that 'air runtime' should bother end users? even if runtime is already installed - why every air must be also 'installed' before just launching and running??

if i want to have air app just working from cd/dvd without any installs, downloads, explanations and instructions - should i better be looking to standalone projectors like mdm which build "working executables" or adobe in yet another three years will finally get it also?

I'm getting a 404 on the link to the beta forums
http://www.adobe.com/go/air2_forums

Release notes for beta state: "WebKit in AIR is based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3 "

Safari 4.0.3 has web workers built in. You can demo here: http://nerget.com/rayjs-mt/rayjs.html

Does that mean we can use web workers in Air?

@Huzefa - We continue to look at ways to provide cross platform ways of adding support for devices like USB and serial. However, in the near term, one option would be to create a native application that exposes a standard in/out interface and use AIR 2's native process API to communicate with that native library. You might consider looking at libraries like LibUSB to help with this: http://libusb.org/

@Vadim - We are very much looking forward to getting 64-bit Linux out as well.

@nd - Projectors are not something we're planning to support with AIR in the near-term. This could change in time, but we are very much focused on installed applications for now.

@robinsk - This should be fixed now.

@Ian - Web workers are currently not supported in AIR. This is something we are considering for a future release. If this is important to you, please let us know by providing some additional details.

thanks for reply. could you detail a bit more more reasons why you're only "very much focused on _installed_ applications"?

i don't get a point - to me 'simple projector' seems like a foundation block for standalone applications. therefore imho AIR should provide such functionality (be it with some limitations or restrictions but, currently without third-party tools which aren't reliable enough, there is a huge gap between standalone flash player projector and standalone air apps that require installing).

is this plain marketing- branding and air promotion thing that you're trying to push and spread 'air runtime' signature with all banners (i.e. installers, separate downloads, etc) to end users or there are some more fundamentals concepts? :)

thanks.

Still no Linux 64bit version? If I'm not wrong you started talking about the 64bit version in May and since that time nothing has happened...

@ND: Thank you for following up. There are a variety of reasons that we're focused on installed applications. Most importantly, a vast majority of the use cases that customers tell us they want to use AIR for require this approach. When an application is installed, it registers itself with the operating system. This helps the user to discover the application at a later date (Start menu on WIndows, Mac applications folder, etc.) or easily know where to go if they want to uninstall it. For IT admins, it allows greater control since their toolsets and policies depend on applications being installed. While I will not say we will never add support for this, it is not something we're looking at in the near-term.

@GeekMiki: We are most definitely working on 64-bit versions. Our plan is to sim ship 64-bit support with Flash Player as a dot release. It is extremely important to us to make 64-bit builds available for AIR 2. Prior to shipping, we'll have a public Labs release. In the meantime, you might considering checking out this technote for a workaround: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/kb408084.html

Thanks for the response about web workers. It's important to me, but AIR is still usable without. However, if you read tech blogs talking about AIR, you'll see they often point out the lack of multi-threading as a deal breaker.

I really don't care if multi-threading comes in the form of web workers or some other mechanism that works with flex and ajax, but by not having it, it's hurting your cause.

Coming from .NET/Silverlight it's the one thing I really miss.

Hey I just want to say how much I appreciate the hard work you guys do. I really like using AIR and I hope that Adobe plans to support it for many years in the future. It's just so nice to make apps for myself with it. I made a great IRC app, I plan on maybe making a jabber chat app. The 2.0 looks great. I don't know how Adobe AIR is supposed to make any money (I use the free sdk), I guess the IDE? Well in any case, I use AJAX and vim, and again I think Adobe AIR is awesome. I actually hated it before I started developing my own apps, but now I love it. Thank you again!