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Adobe AIR

Cross-platform runtime system for building rich web applications

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AIR is a runtime environment that allows Adobe Animate content and ActionScript 3.0 coders to construct applications and video games that run as a stand-alone executable and behave similarly to a native application on supported platforms. An HTML5 application used in a browser does not require installation, while AIR applications require installation from an installer file (Windows and OS X) or the appropriate App Store (iOS and Android). AIR applications have unrestricted access to local storage and file systems, while browser-based applications only have access to individual files selected by users.

AIR internally uses a shared codebase with the Flash Player rendering engine and ActionScript 3.0 as the primary programming language. Applications must specifically be built for AIR to use additional features provided, such as multi-touch, file system integration, native client extensions, integration with Taskbar or Dock, and access to accelerometer and GPS devices. HTML5 applications may run on the WebKit engine included in AIR.

Notable applications built with Adobe AIR include eBay Desktop, Pandora One desktop, TweetDeck, the former Adobe Media Player, Angry Birds, and Machinarium, among other multimedia and task management applications. According to Adobe, over 100,000 unique applications have been built on AIR, and over 1 billion installations of the same were logged from users across the world, as of May 2014. Adobe AIR was voted as the Best Mobile Application Development product at the Consumer Electronics Show for two consecutive years (CES 2014 and CES 2015).

In June 2019, Adobe announced it would begin transitioning ongoing support and development of Adobe AIR to Harman. Adobe continued to provide support for versions 32 and earlier until the end of 2020, as support would be managed by Harman.

Features

Using AIR, developers can access functionality including text, vector graphics, raster graphics, video, audio, camera, and microphone capability. AIR also includes additional features such as file system integration, native client extensions, desktop integration and access to connected devices. AIR enables applications to work with data in different ways, including using local files, local SQLite databases (for which AIR has built-in support), a database server, or the encrypted local store included with AIR.

Developers can access additional functionality by building AIR Native Extensions, which can access full device functionality being programmed in the native language.

Desktop features

On desktop platforms, AIR supports:

  • Window management – Opening multiple windows, minimizing, maximizing and resizing AIR windows.
  • Menu bar – Adding a native menu bar to AIR windows, with sub menus and custom menu items.
  • File management – Discovering drives, files and folders on the PC, creating and deleting files, renaming, copying and moving files.
  • Console applications – Executing native applications with command-line arguments, and receiving feedback via standard I/O & error streams.
  • Multithreading – Managing multiple threads, to execute ActionScript 3 code in the background without freezing the user interface.
  • Web browser – View HTML web pages with full CSS and JavaScript support within applications, with the integrated WebKit-based web browser.
  • Clipboard access – Programmatically copy or paste text, bitmaps or files into the system clipboard.
  • Drag-and-drop – Allows users to drag text, bitmaps or files into AIR applications.

Mobile features

On mobile platforms, AIR supports many mobile hardware features:

3D graphics

In 2011, the addition of Stage3D allowed AIR apps access to GPUs for hardware acceleration. Several third-party frameworks have been developed to build upon the functionality of Stage3D, including the Starling Framework and Away3D. These frameworks are also compatible with AIR, and provide vital performance improvements to AIR apps published for mobile devices.

AIR Native Extensions

AIR apps can be augmented in functionality with the usage of AIR Native Extensions (ANEs). Native extensions are plug-in code libraries that contain native code wrapped with an ActionScript API, allowing developers to access native features not otherwise usable in AIR, such as Apple Game Center or Google Cloud Messaging.

Native extensions may be developed by anyone using publicly available tools; some are distributed for free or even as open source, while others are sold commercially.

Native extensions may be programmed in the native language on each platform, allowing access to the full set of platform APIs provided by the developer. (C++ for Windows, Java and C++ for Android, Objective-C for iOS).

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