Adobe AIR 18.0.0.143

What's new in this version:

New Features:
- VideoTexture Support for Android - The current ActionScript (AS) implementation on Android doesn't allow direct access to texture from video or camera for use with Stage3D. Currently, in order to use video or camera frames as textures with stage3D, the SWF content developer must use a bitmap representation of a video or camera frame. Once a bitmap is created from the video or camera object, the developer needs to create a texture and update the created texture with the bitmap. This process normally requires multiple copying of the bitmap, which can be slow and resource intensive.
- To resolve this problem, this feature provides video texture objects that support NetStream and Cameras in a manner consistent/similar to StageVideo. Such textures can be used as source textures in stage3D rendering pipeline.
- This feature is already supported on Win,Mac and iOS and in this release we have implemented this feature it on Android. This will be supported on Android devices with OS version >= Icecream-Sandwich (i.e. Android 4.0)
- Build Number in AIR iOS - This feature will allow developers to update only the build number while keeping the version number same so that their application is available quickly on Testflight for beta testing. Now tag will be used to populate CFBundleShortVersionString and for CFBundleVersion. Previously we used only to populate both the keys in info.plist. CFBundleShortVersionString will be the final release version application version of the application. This is useful in case of TestFlight because if developers do only minor changes in application , then they can only update CFBundleVersion to skip the app review phase by Apple(which is time consuming).
- ADT Packaging Time Improvement with Support for Parallel Compilation for iOS
- Air 18 introduced multi-threading support in compiler. With this improvement, we have gained around 20% in packaging time on the top of last improvement which was made in Air 17.
- Stage3D - Standard Extended Profile for Mobile - In version 17 of the Runtime, Standard Extended Profile was introduced for iOS and Android devices that support GLES. In version 18, Standard Extended Profile support is now available for Flash Player and AIR desktop.
- VideoTexture Support in AIR for Windows, Mac and iOS - Air 18 introduced multi-threading support in compiler. With this improvement, we have gained around 20% in packaging time on the top of last improvement which was made in Air 17. It is represented by a new constant ‘STANDARD_EXTENDED’ in the Context3DProfile class. This constant can be used in the requestContext3D and requestContext3DMatchingProfiles methods of Stage3D. The “standardExtended” profile can only be accessed if the swf version is 28 or more.
- ETC2 Support for ATF - With OpenGL ES 3.0 a new texture compression technique i.e. ETC2 (Ericsson Texture Compression 2) was introduced as a standard feature.
- ATF (Adobe Texture Format) is a container format provided by Adobe for different compression formats supported by different platforms. It supported three gpu texture compression formats till now which are DXT1/5(desktop), ETC1 (Ericsson Texture Compression 1) (android) and PVRTC (iOS). In AIR SDK 18, ETC2 support is added (Ericsson Texture Compression 2) in ATF. Now app developers can use ATF with ETC2 which will work both on Android and iOS devices which are OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant.
- Earlier ATF could only be created for either one or all three texture compression formats, now user can use any combination of compression formats to create an ATF. By default –c argument in png2atf now creates an ATF having all four textures (etc1, etc2, dxt1 and pvrtc). Argument “e2” is introduced for creating ATF having etc2 texture.
- This feature is enabled with swf-version 29.
- ATF tools (png2atf, pvr2atf, atfinfo and atfviewer) are upgraded to provide support for etc2 for ATF. These tools will be available in the AIR SDK under the AIRSDK/atftools directory.

Fixed Issues:
- "Error #3672: Buffer creation failed" while calling createVertexBuffer() to a Texture on Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (3960859)
- "Texture format mismatch" while uploading BitmapData to a Texture on Samsung Galaxy Tab (3959595)