I see a lot of requests for new AIR features on blogs, sent in via Adobe's web site, and sometimes on comments posted here. That's great, and the AIR team takes all of these into consideration.
These requests are often accompanied by straw-man arguments detailing why we haven't included these features yet—and then more arguments demolishing those straw-man arguments. No doubt this is intended to remove the obstacle that had prevented us from implementing this feature.
Amusingly, the straw-man arguments are basically all wrong. I thought I'd take the time to post some of these and refute their accuracy, with the ultimate goal of providing a better understanding of how we do make decisions.
Today's straw man: Feature x hasn't been implemented because of its perceived security risk.
This argument is (correctly) knocked down each time by noting that AIR applications are desktop applications and can already do dangerous things. It doesn't make sense for us to limit new features that aren't any more dangerous. We do design features to default to safe behaviors, but we don't reject features just because they might be dangerous, too. The feature you want might well be dangerous, but I can assure you that's not why it isn't yet implemented.
But it would be nice to enable all the goodies that recent versions of webkit have (like -webkit-box-shadow, css gradients etc)
That wouldn't cause any problems with security, right?
I typically assume it is just a manner of time, and wrapping native code into AS3 API's. Such as accessing display settings.
I want the next version of AIR can access the USB Thumb Drive, it is enough to have simple read/write ability to SharedObject.
[You can access thumb drives today via the filesystem API. —Oliver]
I also assume the most requested features will only be a matter of time before they're implemented. For instance, given the large amount of requests for launching other applications and launching native apps depending on a file type, I'm assuming that this support will at some point be in there.
Does Adobe maintain an official and public roadmap somewhere? Because I haven't been able to find one. I think a lot of repeat feature requests could be avoided simply by showing when feature x is planned to be implemented (if at all). Of course, then you'll get the flood of messages saying "why can't feature x be implemented sooner"...
hi. im adobe air lover, why adobe air doesnt support mobile device?
I just assumed that if a feature isn't there, it's because either you haven't had the time to add it, or the interest, or both - and maybe sometimes you haven't thought of it yet. :-)
I'd like to take this opportunity to request some GPU accelerated Pixel Bender for Flash Player, please.
Oh, also something maybe based on OpenGL (or a subset), to take advantage of traditional hardware accelerated rasterization technology (as an alternative to the DisplayList).