Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog

We absolutely love to see the amazing examples of what can be accomplished by our Adobe Runtime developers.  Detective Grimoire, from the very talented folks at SFB Games, was recently released on Steam after being greenlit in just 19 days!  Tom Vian took the time to answer a few questions about the game and their development process for our community.  If you haven’t checked this game out, make sure to finish reading the article and then head on over to Steam, Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon App Store, or their website and pick up a copy!

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Adobe AIR technology has made it possible for developers around the world to create some of the best and most stunning mobile games available today. You can now use this versatile technology to promote your games to a much larger audience. The new Instant Game Preview capability  (for Android platform only) lets users try your game and experience it first hand without downloading and installing the application.

For a quick demo, open this link in your Android browser –

http://www.adobe.com/gamepreview/?game=Games2WinDemo/TF.html

The fact that AIR would allow users to try your games and applications very quickly, chances of your app getting eventually installed increases manifolds. Instant Game Previews are better than video based previews because they let the user actually ‘play’ the game instead of just ‘watching’ it.

For details on how you can quickly create a preview for your game, refer to the following devnet article –

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air-mobile-game-previews-android.html

Yesterday we released Flash Player 13 and the AIR 13 Runtime and SDK.  This was one of our major quarterly releases that includes new functionality, bug fixes, and security updates.  We recommend reviewing our release notes or visiting the Flash Player announcement or AIR announcement page for download links and additional details.

AIR developers and users will notice that the AIR version jumped from 4 to 13.  This was done specifically to bring AIR and Flash Player in sync with their version number.  The two share common code and we believe this should help unify perception of both products under the Flash Runtime umbrella.

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We’re happy to announce that we are updating the version of our extended support release to Flash Player 11.7 on Mac and Windows. Flash Player 11.7 will replace version 10.3 as the extended support version beginning July 9, 2013.

In order to continue receiving security updates, an upgrade to either Flash Player 11.7, or the standard Flash Player 11.8 release is required.

Flash Player 11.7 provides exciting new features, including Actionscript concurrency, webcam support for StageVideo and more. It also enables Protected Mode for FireFox on Windows, a sophisticated security-in-depth feature. With Protected Mode, Flash Player runs as restricted process, making it more difficult for attackers to build working exploits. Click here to learn more.

Flash Player 11.7 leverages hardware acceleration for audio, video and rendering to increase performance and lower CPU usage.

To ensure the smoothest possible transition, we encourage IT organizations deploying Flash Player 11.7 in managed environments to thoroughly test audio and video playback for critical use-cases using the latest available version before deploying this release widely. When hardware-related playback and stability problems do arise, updating to the latest hardware drivers frequently resolves these issues.As a secondary workaround, the Flash Player Administrator’s Guide details mechanisms for disabling hardware and audio acceleration via mms.cfg.

We have been hard at work to make Flash Player better than ever, and we look forward to continuing to serve you with a great web experience.

Today we are excited to announce the availability of Adobe Flash Player 11.6 (Code name Folsom) for Windows and Mac and Adobe AIR 3.6 for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Adobe AIR 3.6 introduces packaging and loading multiple SWFs feature. This feature provides our developers with better memory management by allowing them to load the assets they need dynamically at any time from multiple swfs and not have to load it upfront.

In addition to the features we’ve introduced in AIR 3.6, we’ve also improved the full screen permission dialog UI and Graphics Data Query in Flash Player 11.6; which game developers can use to generate sprite sheets at runtime.

We encourage you to download AIR 3.6 and Flash Player 11.6 and provide your feedback and comments. Please follow us on Twitter (@FlashPlayerBeta) and Like us on Facebook.com/AdobeAir to stay updated on upcoming beta builds and features.

We are really happy to announce that we just updated the SWF (SWF19) and AMF3 specs with the latest information. I promised this to you guys a long time ago, this will give you the latest details if you are working with both formats. Some things were either missing inaccurate in both specs, so we fixed that. The AMF3 specification had some types missing like Vector and Dictionary that we introduced in Flash Player 10.

The SWF specification had some undocumented things like a new tag for Telemetry (Adobe Scout) and some other miscellaneous attributes that we now fully document.

You can find both specs at the following url:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html

Today we are excited to announce our plan to move to a rapid release cycle for Flash Player releases starting with Flash Player 11.5.  This will allow us to deliver more frequent updates to our labs beta community.

Using the background update mechanism in Flash Player, beta releases will be installed seamlessly to our nearly 1.1 million beta users and we encourage you to subscribe if you have not already. Beta users will have access to new features earlier in the release cycle to use, test, and provide feedback. You may also subscribe to our Twitter channel @FlashPlayerBeta https://twitter.com/FlashPlayerBeta to stay on top of the current release schedule updates.

Due to this change we will consolidate our private and public beta programs into a single public beta program so we can bring the world’s best runtime to our beta users’ fingertips.

Considering how important the private prerelease program is as a channel of communication and discussion with our key partners and customers, we will continue to keep our private beta forum active for discussion only; however, no Flash Player beta updates will be posted on this forum.

We believe moving to the rapid approach is going to allow us to test Flash Player under different configurations and help us get early feedback from our customers; which ultimately will improve the user experience and drastically improve the Flash Player and AIR robustness and increase product stability.

The runtimes team is excited to continue to work with you and we are looking forward to your feedback and seeing the amazing experiences that will be delivered through Flash Player and AIR.

Several users have reported that their ELS (Encrypted Local Store) data created using AIR 3.3 or earlier is no longer available after updating to the AIR 3.4 runtime.  This occurred due to updates in the ELS architecture to improve security and improve stability with the removal of a third party library.  The result, however, is that the AIR 3.4 runtime can no longer access ELS data created with AIR 3.3 or earlier.

In the past we’ve given guidance on the usage of ELS in both blogs and our help documentation, suggesting that developers should not depend on ELS as permanent data storage because it “can be lost for a variety of reasons.” While our position on this hasn’t changed, we understand that some applications have come to depend on this data and we are actively working on a fix for the problem.

In the interim, Adobe is going to turn off automatic updates for the AIR 3.4 runtime so users will not be prompted to update to AIR 3.4 until we solve this issue.

Application publishers and developers, who are affected by this change in behavior of ELS, need to inform their users who have already installed AIR 3.4 to uninstall AIR 3.4 and install AIR3.3 using the instructions below:

Uninstall Adobe AIR 3.4 runtime from windows and install AIR 3.3:

1. In the Windows Start menu, select Settings > Control Panel.
2. Select “Programs and Features from control panel.
3. Select “Adobe AIR” to uninstall the runtime.
4. Click the “Uninstall” button.
5. Install AIR 3.3 runtime http://download.macromedia.com/air/win/download/3.3/AdobeAIRInstaller.exe

Uninstall Adobe AIR 3.4 runtime from Mac and install AIR 3.3

1. Browse to Applications : Utilities
2. Double click on “Adobe AIR Uninstaller”
3. Install AIR 3.3 runtime http://download.macromedia.com/air/mac/download/3.3/AdobeAIR.dmg

Please note that AIR 3.4 SDK will continue to be available for any developer wishing to take advantage of the new features contained in this version.  Developers should deploy these applications using our “captive runtime” capability to ensure the application functions as expected.

Going forward, we plan to re-implement our ELS changes in a future version of AIR to remove dependencies on 3^rd party libraries and improve the stability and security of AIR applications. Applications that continue to use ELS as persistent storage could be impacted. We will give advanced notice and make releases available on labs. Please report any other issues you may experience together with reproducible steps here.