FlexAbility

Lately I’ve been trying to get some sense of when AIR 2.0 might be finding its way onto mobile devices, and when the Flex Mobile Framework (aka Slider) might be available to developers. I’ve talked/emailed with a couple of people from Adobe but I’m not sure who would want to be quoted on what – so I’m not going to quote anyone. Just consider these to be my more-or-less informed best guesses.

• This first point I’m fairly sure of: While mobile devices with Flash 10.1 installed should be getting into the public’s hands by July 1, 2010, this won’t include AIR 2.0. So you’ll be able to run Flash applications in your device’s browser, but you won’t be able to install and run any AIR applications. (And, of course, even your browser based content will need to be designed so that it uses a lot less memory and CPU cycles than we’ve become accustomed to having at our disposal when creating Flash content for the desktop. For example, applications created with the current Flex framework won’t run satisfactorily, if at all.)
• It’s my impression that AIR 2.0 will be available for development devices some time in “late 2010″. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that this will happen by October 1st. But be warned – I’m an optimist!
• Then – guessing wildly here – it will start to appear on devices in the public’s hands – by January 1, 2011?
• And – more guessing – a beta version of Slider will be available to developers around November 1, 2010. With a commercial release by April 1, 2011?

It will be fun to check back in a year or so and see how well these predictions/guesses have fared.

I should also mention that we have another option available to us much sooner – Adobe is publicly saying that the CS5 Flash “export to iPhone” option will be available in a beta by the end of 2009. I won’t predict how well this is going to work, but for simple applications it’s probably worth considering.

If you know something that contradicts what I’m saying here, or even confirms it, I’d love to hear it – please add a comment!