Friday, November 18, 2011

AIR for Desktop abandoned too?... Defnitely not

-- UPDATE 2 --
Mike Chambers has confirmed below that AIR for Desktop is here to stay! Thanks Mike.

-- UPDATE --

According to Adobe evangelist Renaun Erickson, AIR for desktop is not being dropped. See his comment at http://renaun.com/blog/2011/11/the-gaming-side-of-renaun/. While this is certainly good news for now, I think we are all left with some uncertainty about the future. I'm not ready to jump ship yet but I am not totally convinced either.

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With all the confusion and terrible communication from Adobe regarding Flash lately it is getting hard to weed out the truth from the rumors. However, one thing that is impossible to miss is the lack of mention of Adobe AIR for Windows/Mac. If you look at the recent posts from Adobe here and here you will notice no mention of it.

Now there are two possible reasons for this:
  1. This was an oversight and they are planning to continue to develop it or
  2. This was intentional and they are no longer planning to develop it
Option 1 seems very unlikely to me unfortunately. Given that Adobe has been under fire for the last week because of the terrible way they communicated things, I find it hard to believe that this was just overlooked. I have posted several comments, as have others, asking for comment with no response at all. So this leaves option 2. If Adobe plans to abandon Adobe AIR for desktop, then we as a developer community are basically screwed and left with the unfortunate task of porting our applications to other languages. This, of course, will unfortunately delay future releases and drive up the costs of our products... which ultimately hurts our customers as well.

While I respect the fact that Adobe needs to make very difficult business decisions, it certainly doesn't make me feel any better.

Adobe - this is your last chance to respond to the community on this before we make the switch to something else.



9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally agree - well said.

Anonymous said...

See response by Adobe evangelist here in comments section
http://renaun.com/blog/2011/11/the-gaming-side-of-renaun/

yanli said...

Don't worry, AIR will not be abandon, because it is a competitive product against Java and .Net.

Since AIR is part of Flash technology, any news mentioned Flash player is also related to AIR.

Also, Flex 4.6 are releasing soon, they will announced the future plan for AIR once it is out of NDA period.

Rob McKeown said...

@Yanli - would you like to comment on how you know that?

mesh said...

Adobe AIR for desktop is not being abandoned. I am working on getting explicit info on it in this document:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/articles/recent-updates.html

Should be up in the next hour or two.

mike chambers

mesh@adobe.com

Rob McKeown said...

Thanks Mike. We all appreciate how difficult it must be to keep up with these questions.

Unknown said...

Andrew provided an update:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html#comment-6765

Derek Vadneau said...

This is why there is so much confusion: I'm not sure what the answer is but I'll just speculate on my blog to create a stir.

Why not just ask the question on your blog, instead of making a statement and then an ultimatum at the end?

"Adobe - this is your last chance to respond to the community on this before we make the switch to something else."

Were you speaking for yourself/company or the AIR/Flash community? It really sounds like you're making quite the assumption.

I realize your blog isn't a news site, but a degree of levelheadedness would be appreciated by everyone, especially at this time.

You changed your post and title but it's still aggregated as the original, so you're creating the FUD you commented on.

daniel said...

I definitely don't like the fact that they DID abandon Linux development...

I used to use windows (as starter) to develop applications in various languages, then moved to linux. It does make a big difference. Linux seems to be really software development oriented in all its aspects - now if want to keep up with AIR, have to move to win again...That's definitely a huge step backwards for me!
:S (and a sad face)