14 DAY TRIAL // With Adobe AIR 2.0 barely out the door, a new version is now available. AIR 2.5 focuses on expanding the availability of the platform with mobile devices taking center stage along with TVs. There are, however, some updates for desktop users as well.
"Adobe is pleased to announce at the Adobe MAX 2010 conference the availability of Adobe AIR 2.5 for televisions, tablets, smartphones and desktop operating systems," Adobe announced on its AIR Team blog.
For desktop users the changes are hardly revolutionary. One interesting new feature that should please developers and make for better looking applications is support for CSS @font-face which enables developers to add web-based fonts to their apps.
The @font-face rule is supported by most modern browsers and AIR is now joining the pack. Applications built with AIR can use custom fonts from the web from places such as Typekit.
Adobe mentions Typekit in the announcement as a possible source, no surprise since the two companies have recently signed a partnership which enables developers to license as many as 120 Adobe fonts using Typekit.
Another new feature in AIR 2.5 for desktop users is support for CSS shadows, which, as the name implies, enables developers to create shadow effects using standard CSS rather than hacks or images.
A new feature interesting for developers allows them to render web content using the users native browser rather than the built-in WebKit-based rendering engine used by AIR.
Finally, Adobe AIR 2.5 brings hardware decoding support for H.264 video but only on the Windows platform. This should enable more hardware to run HD video and is a lot less taxing on the CPU.
Adobe says that it plans to expand the hardware acceleration support to the other desktop operating systems it supports, Mac OS and Linux, in future releases.