Are AIR apps stable?

Question

I wanted to write a desktop apps. I wanted to leverage microphone and audio compression techniques available in flash. This led me to consider building an AIR application.

Before starting to work, I wanted to know if AIR is a stable framework? Would it work equally well on Mac?

Thanks.

Answer 1

My experience writing a B2B sales app that runs on AIR is, yes, AIR is plenty stable both in the sense that it doesn't crash randomly and that the API is stable.

In fact, when compiling the application you explicitly set which version of AIR and Flash Player to target, freezing the API to a specific version. Further, AIR 3.x adds Captive Runtime allowing you to bundle a specific version of the AIR runtime with your application.

As far as working equally well on Windows and Mac (Linux is no longer supported as of AIR 3) I would say that the answer is "pretty much". I've found the Mac version to be slower than the Windows version but I haven't done any benchmarking so I can't say by how much.

Aside from that you just have to be aware of potential cross platform issues when writing your app. For instance, Windows and Mac OS application menus are somewhat different; when working with the file system be sure to stick 100% to the File API.

Answer 2

I already use some Air application on Mac and I'm pretty sure this is not as stable as a native application. However, it is conveniant because of cross operating system capability of Air.

Seems to be a choice to make ;)