Adobe this week took the Linux version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime product out of beta, bringing it up to speed with the versions available for Windows and Mac users.
The new version differs from previous beta versions of Adobe AIR for Linux, by fully supporting Flash 10, which includes 3D effects, high-resolution text rendering, custom filters, and support for digital rights management (DRM). These features are important for media-intensive applications, such as photo- and video-editing tools, and applications like Adobe's AIR-based media player software, which make use of the DRM support to serve up protected content.
The update is also an important step towards unifying AIR across all three major computing platforms.
The Windows and Mac versions of AIR were able to take advantage of certain features that the Linux version could not, fragmenting which apps Linux users were able to run. Most recently this happened with the popular Twitter client Twhirl, which became unusable for Linux users after requiring the latest spec of AIR to run special Flash 10 features.
Adobe's Adrian Ludwig said his company intended to keep all three versions up-to-date, and roll out future updates at the same time.
In practice, this will let developers write an application that does not require any special coding to get it to run on all the platforms. More importantly, it would prevent situations like that which occurred with Twirl from ever happening again.
Additionally, Ludwig said one of the hurdles of developing for Linux has been compatibility.
"Less than two percent of clients are using Linux," he said. "It's challenging to deliver applications to such a small market." Ludwig said that having a platform that offered cross-compatibility, like AIR, would bring in new developers that might have previously never thought of building their applications for something other than Windows.
Ludwig said the next frontier for AIR was getting it into handheld devices, starting with "mid-mobile" devices — something that was outlined at last month's Adobe Max conference.
The new Linux version is only compatible with three variants of the operating system, including Ubuntu 7.1 and higher, Fedora 8.1 and higher, and OpenSuse 10.3 and higher.
Linux may still be less than 5%, but it is important due to its high growth rate. Don't believe the new-PC shipment OS figures, as that is what M$ seeks to distort with forced bundling of its OS offerings. Those figures miss out on all the loading of Linux onto older/second PCs to given them an extra 3-5 years of life. And if education goes Linux as many countries are doing, then Linux will grow significantly over the decades to come.