Introducing Adobe AIR 1.5

Adobe AIR 1.5 marks the second significant update to the AIR runtime since its release on February 25, 2008. Since then, the developer community response to AIR has been truly amazing with more and more applications appearing every day. With over 260 applications on the Adobe AIR Marketplace and well over 25 million installations of apps deployed on Adobe AIR, we're seeing a tremendously positive response not only from application developers but end users as well.

Many applications powered by AIR are becoming extremely popular, such as Twhirl, the most popular Twitter desktop (over 600,000 downloads and counting). One of our favorite applications is from FedEx, called FedEx Desktop, which provides customers a way to easily track and manage their packages. Parleys is an application that allows you to watch developer-oriented presentations recorded at popular conferences.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we are continuing to add powerful, new capabilities to the AIR runtime with the release of version 1.5. In this release, some of the additional capabilities now available to AIR developers include the following:

• Encrypted local database: By popular request from developers, we've added a way of encrypting the local database inside of AIR. While encrypting data in AIR has been possible since AIR 1.0, using the Encrypted Local Store (ELS)—the new encryption support—offers better support for encrypted larger data files and is generally more convenient since many developers prefer to persist using the local database.
• Flash Player 10 capabilities: Adobe Flash Player 10 is one of the most significant releases of the player, with groundbreaking new capabilities. We've updated the version of Flash Player included with AIR to version 10. For example, it's now possible to take advantage of custom filters, blend modes, and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender. AIR 1.5 also supports the new 3D effects, including perspectiv,e correct transformation, and animation of 2D plans in a 3D space (also known as postcards in space). Rich media enhancements include dynamic streaming to improve the quality of video playback based on bandwidth availability as well as support for the Speex codec for delivering high-quality audio at lower download speeds.
• WebKit update: The version of WebKit included in AIR has been updated to a newer version. The updated version includes Squirrelfish, a new bytecode interpreter that improves the execution speed of JavaScript for common actions. Our internal tests show that HTML-based AIR applications run as much as 35% faster for many types of operations.

The Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, Flex Builder 3, Dreamweaver CS4, and Aptana Studio authoring tools have also been updated to support AIR.

In addition, we focused on fixing critical issues. If you run into a bug or a feature request that you would like to relay back to our team, please submit it using the feedback form. Members of our team read every message that comes through. If you have a general question, post it to the Adobe AIR discussion forums.

We'd also like to invite you to visit our team blog for announcements, tips, and other news related to Adobe AIR.

And be sure to check out Adobe AIR Developer Center for inspiring sample applications, articles, and tutorials.

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