Adobe AIR 4 Beta Released

Thank you for taking the time to answer me in such detail, Ben! It's really good to hear your perspective about the role of Flash at this present time. Definitely a strange place for many of us - seeing how the entire AVMNext/ASNext project played out. I understand that Creative Cloud is the #1 priority for Adobe right now and have been hopeful that as things stabilize in those areas (along with the HTML tooling) that we might see some of these good things all swing around back to the runtimes in some way. I'm still using Flash Player, AIR, and HTML/CSS/JavaScript every day within my main occupation at the university... through client and consulting work... authoring... and more. It's all great stuff and I want to see all of it continue to thrive! Adobe has my support in all these areas. As for as balance - yeah, that fanaticism against Flash really seems to have quieted down over the past 12-18 months. Balance is nice :)

Joseph, I actually don't think we need that much convincing, truthfully. The anti-Flash pendulum swung way too far the past couple of years. The reality is that the balance of where to use Flash and where not to is fluid and ever changing, and some rebalancing was in order. We all admit that, and I've written about the changing world of Flash repeatedly. But the almost fanatical belief that Flash is evil and HTML5 could (or even should) completely replace it was an emotional overreach, not a sane judgment call. And that proved to be really hard to fight. We could have spent every dollar and resource we have and we'd still not have changed public perception. So the wise thing to do was to back down a bit, let the dust settle, and focus on where Flash (including AIR) is needed and where it really adds value. Which is why we have indeed been continuing to work on Flash and AIR, while at the same time building HTML5 tools and offerings. Now that attitudes are shifting back into balance, we'll be better able to tell the story we want to tell, and that's exactly why you've seen these recent announcements. --- Ben

Thanks for continuing to post these updates about AIR/Flash. What do we (as a community) need to do to convince Adobe to provide more resources for the runtimes? AIR/Flash is such boundlessly creative platform! What would make a difference?

Well said Ben. I do so hope Flash can have a real spot with elearning also. I miss using it. Developing iPad stuff school so it is the direction they wanted to go. HTML 5 output from Flash would be fantastic.