Adobe has just released Adobe AIR 1.5. Now you can take advantage of great features like Pixel Bender for custom filters and fills, the new 3D effects, dynamic video streaming (based on available bandwidth), and the Speex audio codec, aimed at providing high-quality audio delivery at lower bandwidth.

In addition to the existing Encrypted Local Store functionality in earlier versions of AIR, Adobe has now added encrypted local databases, which will make it easier to encrypt and locally persist large data sets.

Also, as a follow up to an earlier post on the use of SquirrelFish in AIR, Adobe has confirmed that this is indeed the case. Adobe AIR 1.5 has a WebKit update that incorporates SquirrelFish - Adobe claims that HTML-based AIR applications can run as much as 35% faster.

Download version 1.5 of Adobe AIR.

Developer and User release notes are available as PDF.

• Adobe AIR 1.5 developer release notes
• Adobe AIR 1.5 user release notes

On a related note regarding the Flex Builder 3.0.2 update that takes advantage of the new AIR runtime: be sure to change the app.xml XML namespace to use 1.5 instead of 1.0, as noted on this blog - http://www.bobsgear.com/display/ts/Can%27t+Launch+Air+Apps+After+Upgrading+from+Flex+Builder+3.01+to+Flex+Builder+3.02 I had trouble with my application until I found this post.

Mark Anders from Adobe gave a preview of Thermo and Flash Player 10 at the 360|Flex conference. It’s a good video for designers interested in Flex-based RIA UI development and for Flex programmers interested in what’s on the horizon for designer/developer collaboration.

Adobe is offering Flex training on their developer site using videos and supplemental PDFs. Check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

As of this writing, days one through three have been added.

Currently I’m helping to lead the development of an enterprise-grade rich internet application. We’ve decided that the front-end client is going to be a desktop app running on Adobe AIR and using the Flex framework, but we’re still discussing options as to what the back-end should be running on. Java, .NET, Ruby on Rails, even Python...all have been discussed, but the one we were initially writing off was PHP. In an effort to be fair, I’m re-considering, and recently finished reading a book, php|architect’s Guide to Enterprise PHP Development, that aims to position PHP as a viable enterprise platform.

Keep reading “Book review: php architect’s Guide to Enterprise PHP Development”...

Inquiring minds want to know: with WebKit officially banking on the use of the SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter (WebKit is the HTML rendering engine underlying Apple’s Safari browser and Adobe’s AIR platform), does this mean that we’ll see Adobe moving away from using JavaScriptCore for JS execution and toward using SquirrelFish?

In 2006 Adobe donated the Tamarin interpreter to the Mozilla Foundation (press release). Tamarin is a JavaScript engine based on Adobe’s Flash ActionScript interpreter. More recently, a branch known as Tamarin Tracing is most likely going to make its way into Firefox 4.

Early tests have shown SquirrelFish to be a (whopping) 52% faster than Tamarin, which seems like it would make it an ideal candidate for AIR.

So the question is: will Adobe abandon the child of its scripting engine in favor of SquirrelFish?

[Update, 11/17/2008] Yes, they did indeed.

For a long time I resisted using Twitter, because I was more interested in getting ToledoMenu.com, along with this blog, up and running. But after seeing some practical benefits to using Twitter, I’m starting to get my feet wet.

When I’m on my Mac, I use Fluid to run a SSB (site specific browser) for Hahlo - and I’ve made it into a nice menubar item that just sits up out of my way, there when I want it. It even has Growl notifications (currently disabled for me - I’ve got work to do!) to let me know when someone I’m following makes a new tweet.

On my Windows machine, I’ve just started using TweetDeck - it’s a full-featured yet minimalist front-end to Twitter that runs on the Adobe AIR platform. That means it’s cross-platform. Thanks to Iain Dodsworth for putting this one together, it’s very well done.

I’m aware that there is a vast array of Twitter clients out in the wild, like the TwitterFox plugin for Firefox. I’d be interested to know what you’re using, so feel free to let me know in the comments.