The same iPad app made with Flex and AIR 2.7. The first list contains 480 items, the second one 280 items. Scrolling looks smooth. Not as smooth as native one, but looks good.

Just captured this video of sample AIR Flex application I posted long time ago.

As you see it runs MUCH better. Scrolling is smooth, transitions are OK. It’s not as fast as native iOS applications but looks like finally you can make more complex iPad apps using Flex than a simple scrolling list.

Adobe did great job with AIR 2.7!

If you publish Flex application to iPad with AIR 2.7 make sure that you set renderMode=cpu. Sample twitter flex app (using 4.5.1 SDK) from my earlier post runs pretty good on my iPad 1.

It’s time to try and build something more complex.

Update: here’s the post with video.

… and it lags more now. Riagora claims to be using some internal Flex SDK build. Waiting to get my hands on it and test this app once again.

AIR 2.6 brought a lot of great stuff, but one specific feature I just couldn’t pass by — publishing for iOS. Yes, there was this thing called Packager For Iphone, but now it is a part of ADT and is claimed to be much faster.

So, we have Flash Builder Burrito, Flex Hero SDK focused on mobile development and now AIR 2.6. You can see clear vector where Adobe is moving. There are many tutorials for Android platform, but iOS is lacking. So, let’s try to compile a small Flex application for iPad.

Few days ago we got AIR 2.6 which now includes iPhone/iPad export from the box. So, I downloaded Flash Builder Burrito, Flex Hero SDK and AIR 2.6 to follow this tutorial and make a simple Flex application for iOS. While development process was easy and deployment straightforward the final result was not what I wanted at all.

Here’s the video we made in the office (thanks Anton for editing!) which shows how slow and unresponsive the interface is. I’d say that it’s by order of magnitude slower than native apps. Considering that the application does nothing but showing local data.

While the idea of AIR being able to be executed everywhere is good and Adobe is working on performance issues (I hope), right now I would agree with Steve Jobs and keep Flash away from my iPad.

Usually I dislike posts titled “10/20/30 whatever for/to whatever whatever“. Why 10? Can there be more? Why you chose these ones?

But this post about AIR applications seems to be really useful. At least I got some interesting stuff from the article. It is definitely a good read if (even if not) you are developing AIR applications.

Here is an example of using new AIR2 feature which allows you to run system native processes from your application. The guy uses a Java tool to grab screen images.

This might not be that exciting, but Java as AIR runs everywhere and this method allows you to basically use Java libraries in your Flash project. I need to parse PDF files for my needs and I am pretty much desperate on this one. But using Java might be a way out. There are plenty of libraries.

Flex UI and some Java logic should be good.

There’s not much information on AIRORM library apart from Getting Started tutorial. Here’s the video which doesn’t really says much about it too but may be helpful.

Check it out. When will we see the first web server running in AIR?