-- 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.
----------
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:
- This was an oversight and they are planning to continue to develop it or
- 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.