What is AIR? AIR is a new technology that Adobe created, using exsisting and new technology. The name stems from Adobe Integrated Runtime. You probably already saw this in the wild either on AOL, eBay’s Desktop, the FineTune Player or the SearchCoders Dashboard. The sole purpose of these apps is to bring the brand closer to the end-user.
Lets take a close look at these apps, first off is the eBay app; this allows users to keep a eye on their auctions and lets them know if they have been outbid, instantly. The AOL Music application lets users watch the hottest and latest top 100 videos strait to their desktop and the last one, the SearchCoders app lets users search the flexcoders mailing list archives, read blogs and chat with other users. They bring the user to the brand, so the audience you reach is much broader.
This opens up whole new possibilities for branded content and a complete new advertising model (which in my opinion has not been completely been discovered). Consider this; You have created an application and evertime you have new content, which you normally send out in a newsletter, the user gets notified by the application. Push instead of pull. Pretty nifty. When you are confined to the browser this simply isn’t possible. So now the content on the web can be truly interactive.
Adobe has done some pretty radical promoting to make this possible; They created the onAIR Bus Tour for their new product, with renowned speakers, people from Adobe giving lectures and hands-on sessions, industry guru’s talk about AIR, give away swag and if that wasn’t enough they even let Colin Moock (the one and only Flash GOD) do a free day of Actionscript3 coding, 9 hours of it! So they must be pretty serious about it. (to spend so much marketing budget on it).
This is what Adobe had to say about their new technology: “Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that enables web developers to use their existing web development skills, code and tools to build and deploy rich web applications and content to the desktop. Adobe AIR has a rich set of features, with support for building applications using HTML, JavaScript, Flex and Flash.”
And this is how i see it: “AIR lets you create cross-platform desktop applications, that enhance the users experience, using skills that you already know. and this can be HTML, JavaScript, Flex and Flash.”
Now this means a couple of things for developers like yourself. First, it is just an API that has the same syntax as Actionscript3, so there is no new major thing to learn and secondly you have (almost) complete access to your OS, which is really fukkin’ cool 
Some of the API’s you have at your disposal are:
■ Windowing API
■ FileSystem Class
■ Clipboard Class
■ SQLite database
■ Drag ‘n drop support
■ Update API
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be talking more on AIR, write tutorials about the wicked stuff you can do, look at some security aspects and present my own cool project i’ve been working on for a while now.
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Stay tuned!
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on Mar 21st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
[...] Noah Shachtman wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWhat is AIR? AIR is a new technology that Adobe created, using exsisting and new technology. The name stems from Adobe Integrated Runtime. You probably already saw this in the wild either on AOL, eBay’s Desktop, the FineTune Player or … [...]
on Mar 21st, 2008 at 10:13 pm
[...] Noah Shachtman wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWhat is AIR? AIR is a new technology that Adobe created, using exsisting and new technology. The name stems from Adobe Integrated Runtime. You probably already saw this in the wild either on AOL, eBay’s Desktop, the FineTune Player or … [...]
on Mar 22nd, 2008 at 1:33 am
[...] TRENT wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe AOL Music application lets users watch the hottest and latest top 100 videos strait to their desktop and the last one, the SearchCoders app lets users search the flexcoders mailing list archives, read blogs and chat with other users … [...]
on Dec 8th, 2008 at 11:23 am
[...] newest wonder child, AIR, is quickly taking ground in the most extreme and inventive [...]