Adobe's AIR 2.5 to Extend Applications Across Various Devices

Adobe, a provider of digital solutions for graphic and multimedia applications, announced to launch Adobe AIR 2.5 software for televisions, tablets, smartphones and desktop operating systems. The offering is an integral part of the company’s Adobe Flash Platform, and helps the developers in creating and delivering standalone applications across a number of devices and platforms.

The solution is equipped with various new features, such as support for smartphones and tablets based on BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android (News - Alert), iOS, and desktops based upon diverse operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

Samsung is the first television manufacturer that will include support for Adobe AIR 2.5 in its Samsung SmartTVs and some other companies such as Acer (News - Alert), HTC, Motorola and RIM will launch a number of devices including tablets and smartphones with pre-installed runtime, later this year and early 2011.

Leveraging the capabilities of Adobe AIR, developers can benefit from various tools such as Adobe Flash Professional CS5, Adobe Flash Builder and Flex to create feature-rich applications, a lot of which have already been made available on Android Market, Intel AppUp center and Apple’s (News - Alert) App Store. Additionally, the company has also introduced a new service named Adobe InMarket, which helps the developers in conveniently distributing and selling their applications across different device types on a number of app stores. Working seamlessly in the background, Adobe InMarket enables end users to download applications directly from the app store.

According to David Wadhwani, senior vice president of Creative and Interactive Solutions Business at Adobe, with the release of AIR 2.5, more than three million Flash developers can now build a single game or application and easily deploy it across multiple application stores and devices. Wadhwani noted that this is a huge step forward for developers looking to build rich, engaging applications but who have historically had to incur the cost of building them separately for each device and platform.

With the help of AIR 2.5 end users can enjoy rich application experiences. The platform offers a variety of enhanced features such as support for accelerometer, camera, video, microphone, multi-touch and gestures. Developers can leverage its support for geo location feature to create location-based applications and services, while the solution can display native-browser controls within the application so that HTML and .SWF content can be integrated. It also supports SQLite, enabling the developers to store and cache databases inside an AIR application.

Recently this month, Kulabyte Corporation, a provider of high-quality HD video streaming facilities, extended its encoder integration to include the new features of Adobe Flash Media Server 4 software.