Adobe AIR continues to win developers over with it's ease of leveraging standard web technologies to build cool desktop apps. But it's not without it's drawbacks, especially in terms of memory consumption and debugging. Thankfully, Adobe listened and included better CPU and memory profiling in the latest version of the SDK, Adobe AIR 2.

One of the biggest challenges our team continued to hear from JavaScript developers using Adobe AIR 1.5 was that it was too difficult to track down CPU and memory issues within their HTML-based AIR applications. To help JavaScript developers detect and resolve these issues, we have introduced new runtime support for CPU and memory profiling of HTML-based AIR applications in the Adobe AIR 2 beta.

Aptana jumped all over this and updated their AIR plugin to leverage the debugging capabilities. Apatana CEO Paul Colton created a video demonstrating how it works:

Adobe Air 2.0 Plugin - Profiling Apps from Aptana, Inc. on Vimeo.

In addition, AIR product manager, Rob Christensen told me that AIR 2 includes an updated version of WebKit that includes feature support for JavaScript profiling, SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine which performs 50% faster using SunSpider tests, CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors), styling scrollbars via CSS and Canvas enhancements.

Get a complete round-up of the update via the Adobe blog.


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