Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR was once the king of cross platform development. Sadly, I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone at this point. It’s old, falling behind, not trusted by users, and a poor choice to build either mobile or desktop applications.

With AIR, we construct apps using Adobe Animate components as ActionScript coders. We also used it to create a game for a client that ran on an intranet a couple of years ago. Since it's a self-contained app, it behaves like a normal program and so it's stable. The interface is Adobe standard so it's familiar and easy to use. AIR integrates with a browser as well, so it's hand for making add-on types of things. While it's a great program, I can't recommend it at this time as it's been discontinued. Which is a shame!

If you need to quickly develop and deploy rich Internet applications that run on a broad range of devices, applications that offer basic functionality including graphics, transactional, lookup, dialog windows, etc., then Adobe AIR works well. It does use proprietary technology and in some cases, it is CPU and memory-intensive and can slow things down.

I would recommend [Adobe AIR] because it works very well, I just wish there were more resources out there on it to help the onboarding.

Hackathons, making prototypes, testing an idea out with your team to see if it works before embarking on a more ambitious project. Currently we don't really use Adobe Air for any end user experiences.

I still recommend new up and coming engineers to give Air and Flash a shot, because it's still pretty easy to learn and quick to develop for. I'm much less likely these days, as the heyday of Air has mostly come to an end, but I still feel like ActionScript and Air give newcomers a fairly intuitive way to build fast little games and apps to deploy on the web as well as mobile. I'm not up to date on the current pricing plans for the industry tools, but I can say that neither exorbitantly priced software nor expensive subscription models are any way to get new developers to adopt your tech. Take a hint from Unity and Unreal and let the tiny indies develop for free.

Adobe AIR is well-suited for a developer who is already familiar with Flash and AS3. It is well-suited for 2D app development using Starling or another third-party graphics library. However, to be used appropriately and avoid errors and poor performance, a basic understanding of programming principles is needed, so it's not great for a designer who hasn't studied a lot of coding.

A specific scenario where Adobe air would be a good candidate, is a project that requires the same experience to be delivered via mobile, desktop/kiosk, and browser (via flash). And one in which the assets are all created using Adobe software (photoshop, illustrator, etc.) A scenario where AIR is less appropriate would be a performance-intensive app/game, and especially any type of project that includes 3D assets. While there are 3D frameworks for Adobe AIR, there are many other solutions that would be much better suited for that task (like Unity or Unreal Engine for example).