Adobe AIR (also known as Adobe Integrated Runtime and is codenamed Apollo) is a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

runtime system In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile t ...

currently developed by Harman International, in collaboration with Adobe Inc., for building desktop applications and

mobile application A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on des ...

s, programmed using

Adobe Animate Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Inc. Animate is used to design vector graphics and animation for televisi ...

ActionScript ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. (later acquired by Adobe). It is influenced by HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard. It is now an implementation of ECMAScript (meaning ...

, and optionally Apache Flex. It was originally released in 2008. The runtime supports installable applications on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

, and mobile operating systems, including Android,

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

, and BlackBerry Tablet OS. 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 similar to a native application on supported platforms. A

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

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 A taskbar is an element of a graphical user interface which has various purposes. It typically shows which programs are currently running. The specific design and layout of the taskbar varies between individual operating systems, but generally as ...

or Dock, and access to

accelerometer An accelerometer is a tool that measures proper acceleration. Proper acceleration is the acceleration (the rate of change of velocity) of a body in its own instantaneous rest frame; this is different from coordinate acceleration, which is acc ...

and

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

devices. HTML5 applications may run on the

WebKit WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the P ...

engine An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power ...

included in AIR. Notable applications built with Adobe AIR include

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

Desktop, Pandora One desktop,Top 10 Apps Worth Installing Adobe AIR For
LifeHacker TweetDeck, the former Adobe Media Player,10 impressive Adobe AIR apps
CNET

Angry Birds ''Angry Birds'' is a Finnish action-based media franchise created by Rovio Entertainment. The game series focuses on the eponymous flock of angry birds who try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs. Inspired by the game ''Crush the Castl ...

, 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.AIR app installs cross a billion
Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog1 Billion AIR Installations
Ben Forta 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 will continue to provide support for versions 32 and earlier until the end of 2020, as support will be managed by Harman.

Features

Using AIR, developers can access functionality including

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display ...

, raster graphics,

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...

, audio,

camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with a ...

, and

microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...

capability. AIR also includes additional features such as file system integration, native client extensions,

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

integration and access to connected devices. AIR enables applications to work with data in different ways, including using local files, local

SQLite SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the m ...

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.Using native extensions for Adobe AIR
Adobe Help Center

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 application A console application is a computer program designed to be used via a text-only computer interface, such as a text terminal, the command-line interface of some operating systems (Unix, DOS, etc.) or the text-based interface included with most gr ...

s – Executing native applications with

command-line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

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 A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

– View HTML web pages with full CSS and JavaScript support within applications, with the integrated

-based web browser. *

Clipboard A clipboard is a thin, rigid board with a clip at the top for holding paper in place. A clipboard is typically used to support paper with one hand while writing on it with the other, especially when other writing surfaces are not available. Th ...

access – Programmatically copy or paste text, bitmaps or files into the system clipboard. *

Drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

– Allows users to drag text, bitmaps or files into AIR applications.

Mobile features

On mobile platforms, AIR supports many mobile hardware features: *3D

hardware-accelerated Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calcul ...

graphics rendering (using

Stage3D Stage3D ( codenamed ''Molehill'') is an Adobe Flash Player API for rendering interactive 3D graphics with GPU-acceleration, within Flash games and applications. Flash Player or AIR applications written in ActionScript 3 may use Stage3D to rend ...

) *

Touch-screen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

events (including multi-touch gestures) *Device camera and microphone access (including video encoding for recorded video) *

Accelerometer An accelerometer is a tool that measures proper acceleration. Proper acceleration is the acceleration (the rate of change of velocity) of a body in its own instantaneous rest frame; this is different from coordinate acceleration, which is acc ...

and

geo-location In geography, location or place are used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term ''location'' generally implies a higher degree of certainty than ''place'', the latter often indicating an entity with an ...

sensor input (

or otherwise) *Networking with

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

, TCP and UDP protocols *''AIR Gamepad'' - allows mobile applications to serve as secondary displays and controllers for games.

3D graphics

In 2011, the addition of

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 Away3D is an open-source platform for developing interactive 3D graphics for video games and applications, in Adobe Flash or HTML5. The platform consists of a 3D world editor (Away Builder),

. 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,Native extensions for Adobe AIR
AIR Devnet 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++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

for Windows,

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

and

for Android,

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXT ...

for iOS).

Availability

AIR is a cross-platform technology and AIR applications can be repackaged with few or no changes for many popular desktop and mobile platforms. Different installation options exist for each platform. AIR applications may be published with or without the AIR runtime. Applications packaged with the AIR runtime are larger in file size, and are known as "captive runtime" applications.Generating a Windows installer for your AIR captive runtime application
Adobe Developer Connection If the runtime is not embedded in the app, it must be installed separately. In January 2009, Adobe claimed that there were over 100 million installations of Adobe AIR worldwide, and that "the majority of AIR runtime installations occur at the time the first AIR application is installed by a user". In May 2014, Adobe claimed that over 100,000 unique applications were built on AIR, and over 1 billion installations of the same were logged from users across the world.

Platforms

Adobe AIR, version 32, contains

Adobe Flash Player Adobe Flash Player (known in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome as Shockwave Flash) is computer software for viewing multimedia contents, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the ...

32, and is available for

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

and later, as well as OS X 10.9 and later. Desktop Linux distributions were available until June 2011 with version 2.6, which ended Linux support. Adobe AIR applications can be published as native phone applications on certain mobile operating systems, such as Android (ARM Cortex-A8 and above) and Apple iOS.iOS features in Adobe AIR 2.6
, Adobe Devnet In May 2017, Adobe stopped releasing AIR for Android, and the app was eventually removed from the Play Store in September 2018, but it can still be downloaded through their website. After Adobe's transition of AIR to Harman, they resumed support for Android and the latest version is only available there. The following table explains to what extent Adobe AIR can run on various

mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typical laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on ...

Application development

AIR runs applications within a contained

Flash Player Adobe Flash Player (known in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome as Shockwave Flash) is computer software for viewing multimedia contents, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the ...

instance. It runs

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

s via

rendering engine. Multiple instances of the browser can be started within a single AIR application, but

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

content executes with some security limitations. AIR does not provide direct access to native GUI elements such as navigation bars or controls. Native extensions can be used to access additional native resources.

Development tools

SDK

The AIR SDK is available as a free standalone download for software developers to make AIR applications. SDK users do not need to install any commercial software to use the SDK, although several options are available. AIR apps can be compiled from the command line using the AIR compiler included in the SDK; the compiler can also be called from an IDE to eliminate the need for the command line. AIR can also be used with Adobe Flex. Flex is an integrated collection of stylable

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

, data manipulation and networking components, and applications built upon it are known as "Flex" applications. Flex GUIs are defined in MXML, similar to how Android and Microsoft Visual Studio define GUIs; however, Flex does not give access to native GUI components. AIR applications built without the Flex framework allow greater flexibility and performance, and are known as "pure ActionScript" applications. Video games built on the AIR platform are typically pure-Actionscript projects. Various open-source component frameworks are available for pure ActionScript projects, such as ''MadComponents'', that provide UI Components at significantly smaller SWF file sizes.

Software

Adobe distributes three commercial software products for developing of AIR applications in ActionScript: * Adobe Flash Builder (enterprise application development and debugging) *

(graphics design, animation and scripting toolset) * Adobe Scout (visual profiler for performance optimization) Third-party development environments that target the AIR runtime are also available, including:
Moonshine IDE
a free IDE built with Apache Flex and Adobe Air. It can be used to create ActionScript 3, Apache Flex, Apache Royale and Feathers projects from Moonshine. It also provides cloud support. *FlashDevelop, an open-source Flash ActionScript IDE, which includes a debugger for AIR applications * Powerflasher FDT, a commercial ActionScript IDE *CodeDrive, an extension to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for ActionScript 3 development and debugging *

IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) written in Java for developing computer software written in Java, Kotlin, Groovy, and other JVM-based languages. It is developed by JetBrains (formerly known as IntelliJ) and is av ...

, a commercial IDE supporting ActionScript 3 development and debugging
AS3 & MXML for VSCode
a powerful extension capable to turn the popular Microsoft free editor

Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code comple ...

in a complete AIR IDE Adobe Flash Builder is the premium tool for Flex application development, since it includes an integrated

drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

user interface builder, not found in competing tools like FlashDevelop.

JavaScript applications

Adobe provides for AIR, HTML5 and JavaScript development with Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, although any other

HTML editor An HTML editor is a program for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HT ...

or text editor can be used. AIR can run a subset of JavaScript, with no ability to dynamically execute code when running in the application sandbox. According to Adobe, this restriction is designed to prevent malicious remote content from attacking a user's system. Because of this restriction, JavaScript frameworks that make use of dynamic JavaScript functions like eval() were not initially compatible with AIR. However, several frameworks including Dojo Toolkit,

jQuery jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License. As of Aug 2022, jQuery is u ...

, and ExtJS were updated to run in AIR's application sandbox. Some frameworks like

MooTools MooTools (My Object-Oriented Tools) is a lightweight, object-oriented JavaScript framework. It is released under the free, open-source MIT License. Overview MooTools provides the user with a number of options beyond native JavaScript. These inc ...

were already compatible. Dreamweaver CS4/CS3 requires an additional extension to compile AIR applications, as does Flash CS3 in the form of an update.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2008 software Adobe Flex Adobe Inc. Application programming interfaces Cross-platform software Mobile software programming tools Rich web application frameworks Site-specific browsing