News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

February 26, 2008

software

There’s something in the AIR…again

Posted Feb. 26, ’08, 12:50 PM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Software

Adobe AIR iconAfter running it through an extensive beta, Adobe has announced the maturation of Adobe AIR (boy, it sure seems to be the buzzword of 2008), the company’s cross-platform development environment that seeks to merge desktop and Internet applications. Their open source application development framework, Flex, was also updated to version 3.0.

AIR enables developers to deploy their applications on the Internet as well as on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux by using the same codebase. That means that managing and updating all the different versions of the application across platforms is several times simpler because it only requires the developer to make changes once. The code itself is comprised of web standard languages and protocols such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX, along with Adobe’s Flash and Flex technologies.

In addition, Air ensures a very advanced level of integration between Web 2.0 applications and their desktop companions. Several popular web services and websites, such as AOL, finetune, eBay, NASDAQ, Pownce, Nickelodeon, and Twitter, already have their own AIR-enabled desktop applications. Adobe itself has promised to port its own principal applications, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and other members of the Creative Suite, to the web in the coming years.

This is especially good news for Mac users because of the inherently cross-platform nature of this venture. In the past, developers of several prized Windows applications have opted not to port their applications to work on our platform of choice. Though that situation has been mostly rectified now, there are still some exclusive Windows applications that are missing on Mac OS X. AIR promises to be a good solution for this dilemma and we’re looking forward to some great new applications that aren’t discriminatory towards Mac users.

The only problem I have with Adobe AIR is the fact that the applications aren’t native to Mac OS X. However, to get something you have to be prepared to let go of other things in return and if it does indeed deliver on its promise of excellent cross-platform applications, I guess the lack of the Mac OS X features exclusive to native applications won’t be missed too much.

If you want to give it a whirl, and you should, proceed to the Download Center to grab it and then to the Adobe AIR Marketplace to have a look at the (currently) few applications available.


3 Comments

sdkay said:

WARNING: Heavy nitpicking ahead!!!

>The code itself is comprised of web standard languages and protocols such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX [...]

None of these are protocols, and AJAX isn't a language.

End nitpick.

AIR sounds cool, I guess... It seems a little unnecessary, but what do I know? I'm still not entirely sure what it is.

February 26, 2008 5:44 PM
Anonymous said:

@sdkay

How can you deem something unnecessary, if you don't actually know what it is?

February 26, 2008 10:29 PM
Joel said:

Can AIR serve as just a HTML/PHP/CSS web/text editor? Or is it forced to compile everything at the end?

In other words... does it have any "dreamweaver" functionality?

February 27, 2008 9:25 AM

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