Adobe AIR 2.0: gains MultiTouch, promises performance boost and gesture controls

Adobe and Apple may not yet have inked a deal to bring Flash support to the iPhone, but that hasn’t stopped the Photoshop developer from adding a few next-gen smartphone-focused features to Adobe AIR, which promises a slew of these in its next version upgrade.

Just look at these features and tell us Apple didn’t force industry change when it introduced the MultTouch-savvy iPhone (which now accounts for one-in-forty cellphones sold worldwide, BTW).

As revealed by Adobe AIR application developer, Christian Cantrell, Adobe AIR 2.0 will be the nads when it comes to smartphone and tablet device usage. And the software’s set to ship next year, we’ve learned.

As Apple does already, so the Adobe app will add support for Multi-touch and gesture-based controls – though not both at once (”Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time)”, the developer warns.”

    •    Multi-touch: Touch events are similar to mouse events, but on multi-touch enabled devices, you can track multiple touch points simultaneously.

1. – Multi-touch support:
2. – Windows 7 and beyond.
3. – Requires multi-touch enabled hardware (obviously).

    •    Gestures: Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time). Gestures are the synthesis of multi-touch events into a single event.

1. – Gesture support:
2. – Windows 7 and beyond.
3. – Macs running 10.6 and beyond with multi-touch trackpads.
4. – Type of gestures we support:

• GESTURE_TWO_FINGER_TAP (tapping with two fingers)
• GESTURE_PRESS_AND_TAP (holding one finger down, then tapping with another — convention on some Windows devices for bringing up context menus)
• GESTURE_PAN
• GESTURE_ROTATE
• GESTURE_SWIPE
• GESTURE_ZOOM

Better security, the capacity to open files with selected default apps, native processes to reduce the load of running Air 2.0 apps (basically AIR 2.0 will be smart enough to direct some of its operations to features native on multiple platforms – handy).

There’s dozens of other features likely of interest to developers, including extended support for different sockets, network management, DNS resolution and more.

Accesibility gets a boost too, with the same level of support for such features as already available in Flash.

A beta of AIR 2.0 will be on Adobe Labs late this year. The software should go some way to answering critics who avoid use of AIR because they demand too much memory and aren’t always great performers, with Adobe promising a whole bunch of improvements to boost performance.

Mac users should see multitouch support in those AIR apps they use as these elements are introduced.