Raymond Camden

Adobe AIR 3 and Flash Player 11 hit Labs (and Sony news!)

by Raymond Camden on

This post is more than 2 years old.

So I'm a bit late to help spread the news, but both Adobe AIR 3 and Flash Player 11 betas have hit Adobe Labs. You can check those links for details, but here are some things I'm excited about...

  • Stage3D graphics - Not that I can do any fancy graphics myself - but I'm real excited to see what game developers do with this
  • Native JSON support - bout time. It's not hard to add JSON support into your Flex apps now, but it's nice to see it built in
  • Cubic Bezier Curves - I have no freaking idea what these are but I love saying "Bezier Curves"
  • Native 64 bit support

This is just for desktop right now but obviously mobile is coming.

The other big news is from Sony. This caught me totally by surprise. Adobe and Sony are running a contest (details here: http://www.airappchallenge.com) where developers can win up to $130,000 dollars. Let me write that again just so folks are sure it isn't a typo: $130,000. There's quite a lot of money to give away along with other prizes - all for authoring cool Adobe AIR applications. I have to say - their devices look really cool - and the clam shell/DS-inspired design of their second tablet is fascinating.

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About Raymond Camden

Raymond is a senior developer evangelist for Adobe. He focuses on document services, JavaScript, and enterprise cat demos. If you like this article, please consider visiting my Amazon Wishlist or donating via PayPal to show your support. You can even buy me a coffee!

Lafayette, LA https://www.raymondcamden.com

Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Robert Zehnder posted on 7/13/2011 at 11:36 PM

Good to see some positive news for Sony :)

Comment 2 by Gareth Arch posted on 7/13/2011 at 11:58 PM

I like the idea of the Sony competition, but the offering seems a little off. Rather than have 7 prizes + 1 grand prize, I'd prefer to have 1 not-as-grand-prize, 7 kinda somewhat nice prizes, and 100s/1000s(?!?) of good prizes (perhaps S2 or S1). Sort of like the Playbook deal, but getting people to actually invest a little more time and thought into their app. There were a few too many "random number generator" apps for the Playbook when it was released as people just wanted to get something submitted to get their free Playbook.

I pretty much *know* that whatever I write will not be on par with some shop that decides to enter their app vs. my little homegrown app, so a little way to level the playing field might be nice.

Comment 3 by Chris Bowyer posted on 7/14/2011 at 12:17 AM

@Gareth

I agree. For a moment there, I got all excited about entering my really cool Hello World app