Adobe AIR Ships: Do You Care?
After an extensive beta period, Adobe’s AIR rich internet application application framework is shipping as version 1.0. You can download a copy here. Of course, Adobe isn’t the only player in the market trying to blur the lines between web and desktop applications – Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla all have their own initiatives in this space as well.
You’d think web workers would be all over this sort of development environment, but so far we’re not seeing a lot of RIA work (using AIR or the alternatives) in the sort of personal productivity and groupware applications that we cover most often. Adobe lists a variety of applications already shipping on their Marketplace page, but what’s your experience? Have you even installed AIR on your computers? If so, what are you using it for?
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I’ve not used it myself as I deal with mostly consumer directed websites, but I’ve seen where it can be used effectively. A perfect example was my wife and I were taking a survey this past weekend. The moderator has a web based app to enter the results. Unfortunately, just as he was beginning, the local network went down.
If he had been using AIR, or Google Gears with the built in database storage, it would not have mattered. Store the data for a few days and then move on.
nope
Haven’t, probably won’t unless it really takes off. I try to stick to web standards, it’s not.
It’s installed but only so I can use twhirl (twitter client).
Twitter clients, all the best ones are on AIR, are the only thing I’ve used AIR for so far – but I am super excited to have more functionality available this way. I’d really like to have a little AIR news ticker sitting above all my other apps, for example. I use GMail webclips for subliminal RSS reading all the time and would like a more full-bodied AIR experience of same. There have been a number of apps I’ve wished were in AIR lately, or startups I’ve seen working on them. MindMeister’s Gears implementation is fantastic for travel, though there are some syncing issues.
I think there’s lots of potential here.
i installed it for twhirl… nice, but that’s the thing – unless there’s something that drives the adoption of AIR… meh, who cares? I’m going to try the Google Analytics app too, but my first question will be “Why is this better than the Analytics pages in Firefox?”
no.
Of course we care, all the web world is waiting on RIA to move the layers. I even blogged about it!
This is a hard one. Let me think for a second … No. I don’t.
I did install it, and was a bit disappointed when I found out that most available apps are for the older version!