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Today we're pleased to announce that the next version of AIR is available for immediate download. AIR 18 adds both new features and important bug fixes for the desktop and mobile platforms!
Below are some of the key features and benefits of AIR 18. Please see our release notes for full details.
New Features:
In version 17, Standard Extended Profile was introduced on iOS and Android devices that support GL ES3. In version 18, Standard ExtendedProfile support is added for Flash Player and AIR Desktop. It is represented by a new constant ‘STANDARD_EXTENDED’ in the Context3DProfile class. This constant can be used in the requestContext3D and requestContext3DMatchingProfiles methods of Stage3D. The standardExtended profile can only be accessed if the SWF version is 28 or newer.
The hugely popular VideoTexture feature has come to Android! Introduced in version 17 for iOS and desktop, the team has been hard at work and has now brought the full power and functionality of this feature to Android devices.
VideoTexture is an ActionScript feature that allows hardware-accelerated video to be used as a source texture in a Stage3D environment. Previously, using video with Stage3D requires the use of the Video object, which is not accelerated, and manipulation of the bitmap representations of the video frames. VideoTexture allows direct access to a texture object that is sourced from a Netstream or Camera object. Please see the VideoTexture blog post for implementation details.
This feature allows developers to simply update the build number while keeping the version number the same so that their application is available quickly on Apple’s Testflight for beta testing.
Air 18 introduces multi-threading support with the compiler for even faster build times. With this improvement, we have gained 20% improvement in packaging time on the top of last improvement which was made in Air 17!
With OpenGL ES 3.0 a new texture compression technique, ETC2 (Ericsson Texture Compression 2), was introduced as a standard feature.
ATF (Adobe Texture Format) is a container format provided by Adobe for different compression formats supported by different platforms. It previously supported three gpu texture compression formats; DXT1/5(desktop), ETC1 (Ericsson Texture Compression 1) (Android) and PVRTC (iOS). In AIR SDK 18, ETC2 support has been added (Ericsson Texture Compression 2) in ATF. Now app developers can use ATF with ETC2 on both Android and iOS devices that are OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant.
Fixed Issues:
Known Issues:
Download Locations:
AIR 18 runtime for Windows: 18.0.0.199 Runtime Download
AIR 18 runtime for Macintosh: 18.0.0.199 Runtime Download
AIR 18 SDK & Compiler for Windows: 18.0.0.199 SDK & Compiler Download
AIR 18 SDK & Compiler for Macintosh: 18.0.0.199 SDK & Compiler Download
Note: To provide all the all the necessary tools for our developers in one place and avoid having to download multiple components, we are packaging Adobe AIR 18 SDK and ActionScript Compiler 2.0 in a single SDK called “Adobe AIR 18 SDK & Compiler”.
AIR SDK 18 (Compatible with Flex) for Windows: 18.0.0.199 SDK Windows Download
AIR SDK 18 (Compatible with Flex) for Macintosh: 18.0.0.199 SDK Macintosh Download
Previous versions of the AIR runtime and SDK can be found on the Archived AIR SDK and Runtimes page