Adobe Flash Player 11 & AIR 3 now supports NFC, Devs go wild

Adobe Flash Player 11 & AIR 3 now support NFC for pairing and potentially payments

We knew that the new version of Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 would finally getting Flash on to the iPad and iPhone, but what we didn’t know until recently was Adobe has built in some NFC goodness too! Games and video playback can benefit from NFC. Switching from an iPad to a PC or from a phone to a tablet, saving game play where you left off or handing a video over at the exact moment you stopped watching on one device, so it starts playing on the next device all becomes reality by allowing NFC and Flash work together. Adobe hasn’t really elaborated much on exactly what functions will be available or whether its support for NFC includes emulation, peer-to-peer and, of course, read / write.

From what we can tell based on one small paragraph of text which refers to NFC support, AIR 3 allows developers to use existing code libraries with deep native hardware and OS capabilities. As well as the usual slew of sensors including gyroscopes, magnetometers, light sensors, etc.), multiple screens, native in-app payments, haptic/vibration control, device status, the new development Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will add NFC (Near Field Communications) to that list. Check out the videos below to see it in action.

What devices will the NFC support in Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 work on?

Back in the day you needed to install an AIR application before you could load a specific application or already have Flash Player installed which wasn’t very frictionless. In the new Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 the Captive Runtime allows for one-click install of apps on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac OS, without having to download AIR separately. Full native 64-bit browser support on Windows, MacOS and Linux AIR to deliver them across Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook, Windows, Mac, and connected TV devices. Adobe doesn’t specifically mention Windows Phone OS, but it would seem logical that it is already supported or soon will be supported.

Where things really get interesting is in the monetization area from where we can gather NFC payments could be supported. “Robust protection and monetization (rental and subscription) of premium video content with Adobe Flash Access 3, on mobile platforms as well.” Flash and the subsequent Adobe Flash Player is still a standard when it comes to players for the web, powering 70% of web games, 9 of the top 10 games on Facebook, about 70% of the games on Google+. That’s just the tip of the iceberg and the Google + API is widely expected to support NFC. In fact, it already does in Google’s own Google + Android app.

The new Flash architecture has many more benefits than we are mentioning because our main focus is the NFC aspects. Flash has regained its ubiquity by being able to function on many device types across all channels. Whereas we will wait to hear whether processor issues have been fixed, consider this new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering that delivers 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10. It may be that if you are intending to build an NFC application that will run on all platforms and on all device types, a Flash application for Adobe AIR 3 may be the answer. To find out more about what’s new in Adobe’s latest AIR 3 and Adobe Flash Player 11 architecture, hit the source link or click here, but don’t expect to find specific about NFC aside from the fact the platform supports usage of NFC hardware.