Adobe AIR was a desktop runtime, analogous to the Flash Player for the browser. It supported all of the capabilities of Flash in the browser, including Animati

Adobe AIR was a desktop runtime, analogous to the Flash Player for the browser. It supported all of the capabilities of Flash in the browser, including Animation, as well as additional desktop specific functionality (such as file system access). There were two primary authoring tools from Adobe. Adobe Flash (not Animate), which was the traditional designer / animation tool (but also enabled programing), and Adobe Flash Builder, an Eclipse Based IDE targeted at ActionScript development (and a heavy focus on Adobe Flex, a markup based Application development framework built on top of ActionScript / Flash. Flash was powerful, in part because the Flash Pro authoring tool opened up interactive content development to designers who had little to no programing experience, and then scaled up to allow more advanced functionality via programing. Note, I work at Adobe, and was responsible for Flash community at Macromedia and then Adobe.