The Adobe Flash for digital interaction

IMAGINE

We imagine a world where every digital interaction whether in the classroom, the office, the living room, the airport, or the car is a powerful, simple, efficient, and engaging experience. Flash Player is widely used to deliver these experiences and has evolved into a sophisticated platform across browsers, operating systems, and devices.

We continued to invest in building a range of technologies and prepared for the day that innovation on the web would ignite again. The days of innovation have now returned in full force, and I am delighted to see rich Internet applications coming into their own with Web 2.0.

THE AIR

The AIR project is actually our third attempt at creating this new environment. The first two attempts were part of an experimental project called Central which was code named Mercury and then Gemini after the United States space program, and with AIR code named Apollo. We learned a lot from those first two projects, and as I like to remind the team, Apollo is the one that actually went to the moon.

With AIR, you can leverage your existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy RIAs to the desktop. Just like web publishing allowed anyone with basic HTML skills to create a web site, AIR will enable anyone with basic web development skills to create a desktop application.

As a developer, you can now create a closer connection to your users. With the browser, you have a fleeting, somewhat tenuous, connection to users. They browse to a page, and then they’re gone. AIR enables you to create an experience that can keep you continuously connected to your customers. Just like a desktop application, AIR applications have an icon on the desktop, in the Windows start menu, or in the OS X dock. Also, when you’re running a web application today, it’s a separate world from your computer. You can’t easily integrate local data with your web application. For example, you can’t just drag and drop your Outlook contacts onto a web-based mapping application to get directions to your friend’s house. Yet with AIR applications you can, as it bridges the chasm between your computer and the Internet.

AS3

0 ActionScript is the official programming language of Adobe’s Flash platform. While originally conceived as a simple tool for controlling animation, ActionScript has since evolved into a sophisticated programming language for creating content and applications for the Web, mobile devices, and desktop computers. True to its roots, ActionScript can be used in many different ways by many different kinds of programmers and content producers. For example, an animator might use just a few lines of ActionScript to pause the playback of a web animation. Or, an interface designer might use a few hundred lines of ActionScript to add interactivity to a mobile phone interface. Or, an application developer might use thousands of lines of ActionScript to create an entire email-reading application for web browser and desktop deployment.

ActionScript 3.0 is an object-oriented language for creating applications and scripted multimedia content for playback in Flash client runtimes (such as Flash Player and Adobe AIR). With a syntaxreminiscent of Java and C#, ActionScript’s core language should be familiar to experienced programmers.