By Romil Mittal



16 August 2011

SWF Versioning
Flash Player Version
Adobe Air Version
SWF Version -- 9 -- 9
10.0 1.5 10
10.1 2.0 10
10.2 2.6 11
10.3 2.7 12
-- 3.0 (Beta) 13
Post AIR 2.5 (Flash Player 10.1) however, we started increasing the SWF version with every release, both minor and major. So we decoupled the SWF version with versioning Flash Player or Adobe AIR.
API Availability
A new version of Flash Player and AIR might introduce certain new APIs that were not available in the previous versions. If an application makes use of those new APIs, then the currently installed Flash Runtime (on the end user’s desktop/mobile platform) would check if it is capable enough to execute those new APIs. So let’s see how exactly that happens in the Runtime.
Flash Player – When Flash Player identifies content that is newer than itself (defined by the SWF version) it attempts to run the content as best it can, but eventually fails if the content tries to use features that don’t exist in that version of the player.
Adobe AIR – Unlike Flash Player, AIR does not attempt to run content that was built for newer versions of AIR. The correct API set to be exposed to the application depends on the lower of the following two:
1. SWF version corresponding to the namespace in the application descriptor
2. SWF version of the root SWF in the application
Coming back from where we started – To ensure that newly introduced APIs are available to you while using AIR 3 Beta SDK, remember to add “-swf-version=13” to the compiler arguments.