The application was co-sponsored by Adobe and it actually uses the Dojo framework for AIR, so it’s basically 100% Dojo. Ajaxian has a good writeup of the application.
]]>We are looking forward to the second week. We’ve been trying to take more video and have all made decent progress towards our various code projects. I think a lot of use are also awaiting news of the Brightkite API. We’ve been doing a lot with Brightkite and have ben keeping track of all the places we go. We’ve got the event pages for Stockholm, Berlin, and Warsaw all on Brightkite.
]]>With today’s release of Flash Player 10, there are a ton of new features that will eventually be making their way into AIR. The tour is a great way to get a head start and chat with the teams about what you want to see in future versions of AIR. I’m also hoping to see some really cool Flash Player 10 demos from the community. Hopefully we can show some off on stage.
]]>Of course since that time we’ve seen Twhirl, another AIR application, be purchased by Seesmic and add support for FriendFeed as well. AIR is all over the place.
]]>One of Adobe’s goals is to give developers a platform where they can be confident that their users will get the same experience across devices and operating systems. The Open Screen Project is another step in that direction. We haven’t talked a lot about Adobe AIR for devices but it’s a big part of our plans. We want you to be able to create desktop applications and native applications for devices side by side using the same web technologies.
Over the coming year we should be providing more information about what the mobile experience on AIR will look like. Stay tuned.
More information:
]]>
The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License so you can tweak it and use it pretty much however you want. It should be a great resource for anyone getting started with JavaScript in AIR. For those that like paper, you can order a copy from Amazon and I assume we’ll have a bunch to give away at various events where Adobe has a booth.
]]>The APIs for Prism are for the most part limited to providing the user a desktop icon, a separate memory instance, and something outside the typical browser chrome. These are all great because as Matthew says, sometimes you don’t want your application stuck between two tabs in the browser. But AIR goes beyond that by exposing a lot more of the OS APIs in the hopes of providing a very robust, cross-platform desktop environment.
With AIR you can go offline or leverage your own chrome just like Prism but you can also talk more closely with the file system. You can register your own file types, you get access to the file system, you can create new native windows, you can create your own native menus, you get access to the OS’ clip board and you can drag and drop data between applications. In an effort to bridge the web-desktop gap a bit you can also send data from your AIR application to the browser. Finetune does this when you have the desktop client open and select a playlist from the web interface. We want you to go out and create real desktop applications with Adobe AIR, not just the same application you’ve been creating inside of the browser. You can reuse a lot of that code, but you have a lot more functionality with AIR if you want to use it.
None of these technologies is stagnant, so it will be great to see it all evolve: WPF from Microsoft, Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and Prism. In the end it means there’s a lot more excitement around desktop applications. And I think most importantly, we can use the best platform for the job, we don’t have to be stuck inside of a browser if we don’t want to be.
]]>