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Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

I wish mobile AIR development would get more traction in the developer community. I'm building games with it (using FlashDevelop) and it is great. The best part is that since at its core it is just a SWF I can also run the game over a (Flash enabled) browser.

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I am actually doing games, too. When we started our current game, we looked at the options for multiplatform development and found Air. I was really surprised by the (technical) quality of the system. It's easy to set up, easy to program and has really good performance. I now wonder why I have never really heard about this.

Adobe's toolchain is breathtakingly sophisticated , mature and powerful. It's incredibly easy to start writing really powerful programes with AIR. I look at all these HTML5 frameworks each with their own idiosyncrasies and pain-points, and the stuff you have to do to make it work seamlessly across devices and i want to cry. Then what is the reason AIR never really got traction ? Performance ! AIR is a known performance hog, on mobiles it can be virtually unusable. Adobe really missed the ship on this one. They had everything going for them, but they were never really able to make it's performance worthwhile.Which is a shame, given how much of joy the Flex/Air Platform is to work with

You should check out the newest AIR release (3.3) - with Stage3D you get great gpu driven performance. You don't really need to do anything new to get it if you use wrapper frameworks like Starling (http://gamua.com/starling/)

Yes i know about the new version of AIR, Stage3d And Starling. But it's all moot. This horse was shot in the face long ago when adobe decided to give flex up for adaptation of the Apache Foundation.Adobe is moving away from AIR, it clearly said so in it's own blog post, they are betting on HTML5.I don't see a reason why i would we writing something in a technology which even in the view of it's creator would be going obsolete in some time.

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