Hey Carlos and all who responded to my philosophical waxing about my sadness at abandoning such an amazing platform for developing mobile apps.
I plan to play with Royale and consider it for a new side project I'm looking at for web, and I really appreciate the people who put so much of their time into creating Royale. Being able to continue with the MXML/AS3 model is extremely attractive, especially since I have such a large collection of my own UI widgets and utilities. When the mobile theme was initially released I immediately set out to create mobile apps but needed some of the heavier weight controls in spark (not mobile theme) and so I ended up recreating a lot of UI functionality from containers that didn't need to solve for every use case under the sun which resulted in better performance when mobile devices were so very slow. Of course now that devices are so much faster, that issue faded away for the most part. But being able to continue using my libraries with Royale for a web app is too good to resist. But the decision to go with React Native for mobile has been made and the investment in reworking our flagship mobile app will break ground later this month. And we recently replaced our web app version of the mobile app with React and are going live next week, so there's no room for Royale or Flex at my company anymore, except for RTB sunsetting of the existing AIR apps until we replace them. However, I agree with Paul's comments too about inconsistent DOMs preventing even Royale from fully achieving what we've so enjoyed from Flash all these years. It's just sad that Adobe lost their passion for Flex and Flash/AIR so long ago and didn't keep up. I keep thinking how amazing it would have been if the Flash/AIR was kept competitive, like incorporating new device capabilities directly into the runtime by wrapping the native calls, rather than depending on ANE developers to fill the gaps. ANE is a great model, but Adobe relied too much on the ANE marketplace to provide Flex developers with native functionality that really should have been part of the runtime, organic functionality that nearly every app needs. And my only other complaint about the AIR runtime on mobile is the kludgy implementation of stage text input that never kept up. Custom soft keyboards should have been available as XCode and Android Studio exposed new keyboards, like a Phone number keyboard for instance. And the way stage text input fields have to be destroyed (not simply hidden) to avoid showing up on top of other views. But we worked around all that. I am sorry to see the day we stop using Flex/AIR at my company. Oh well. I raise my glass to all the awesome designers, architects, and engineers who worked at Macromedia, and later at Adobe, and later on the Apache Flex OS project (and Royale) for creating such an amazing platform that brought me such joy, some pain, frustration too, but most of all, pride in the products I created with it. Since earning my ACE years and years ago I've been so passionate about the platform, it's going to be hard to leave it and this amazing community. Peace. Erik
