Adobe squeezes AIR out of beta for Linux users

From CNET News.com: Adobe Systems on Wednesday is taking the Linux version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) product out of beta, and bringing it up to speed with the versions available for Windows and Mac users.

The new version differs from previous beta versions of AIR for Linux by fully supporting Flash 10 which includes such niceties as 3-D effects, high resolution text rendering, custom filters, and support for digital rights management (DRM). These features are important for media intensive applications like 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 toward 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--it fragmented 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.

Adrian Ludwig, Adobe's product manager for platform, says his company intends 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 keep situations like the one with Twirl from ever happening again.

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