Adobe released Air 2 in Beta on the labs section of their website last evening. I’ve been building multi-touch applications in Flash and Flex for the past two year. In order to do this in the past you had to create your own touch events and use additional software to interpret touch events in a meaningful way and dispatch custom touch events that could be used by the Flash runtime. Finally with the beta of Adobe Air and the Air SDK we have native multi-touch events in Flash.
The most basic touch event class is called TouchEvent. The TouchEvent class is going to look extremely familiar to anyone that has used the MouseEvent. Most commonly developers might use the TouchEvent.TOUCH_BEGIN, TouchEvent.TOUCH_MOVE, TouchEvent.TOUCH_END and TouchEvent.TOUCH_TAP event types.
In addition to the touch Event class there are events that respond to gestures. The TransformGestureEvent class responds to pans, zooms and rotate.
If you go to Adobe Labs and pull the 10.1 release of the Flash player you’ll be able see content that is multi-touch enabled in your browser. You can start playing with multi-touch applications by going and grabbing the Adobe Air SDK at Adobe labs.
Other feature of note in Air 2 (from the labs site)
- Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
- Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
- Support for native code integration.
- The ability to open a file with its default application.
- Multi-touch and gesture support.
- New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
- Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
- Global error handling.
- Improved cross-platform printing
- Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.
DougHughes.net 