I need to develop application that has a lot of sliding graphics and 3d animations for showing pictures representing products in a very interactive and fancy manner.
Here is a sample of what I’m trying to do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCAPSzgoHM&feature=related
I heared that adobe air can do the job perfectly, is that true ? the application is not just sliding of course, it will connect to a server, synchronize some data, log information and so on
So, what is the best solution to accomplish this task?
Short answer, Yep it can. and yep it’s true.
Long answer, since AIR3.2 stage3d was introduced to the air platform. Now AIR (as the flash player does) can takes advance of the gpu to render complex 3d content.
Molehill is the new codename of the 3d framework for AS3, you for sure find lot of material on it.
What i suggest you more is using a library/framework built above Molehill (that is indeed just a set of primitives with a low level style syntax). Flare3d, Starling (for 2d), Away3d (4.0 or above) are just few names.
Using this libraries will allow you to fast develop what you had in mind.
All the other tasks you mentioned (connection , log, sync) are pretty easy to do on air.
Now downside of choosing the AIR platform for mobile development on android. Since the introduction of the 3d is pretty recent, it is hard to say exactly the devices supported and the devices that simply fallback to the common 3d rendering system (that is cpu hogging, so not a good choice for mobile).
If you aim to target last generation devices you’ll be pretty ok, and you’ll find in AIR + flash platform tools a strong benefit in terms of development speed.