Sitepen has put together an application called the Dojo Toolbox built on Adobe AIR that gives you access to Dojo’s APIs and source code documentation regardless of whether or not you have an internet connection. You can also make use of the Dojo build tool which lets you manage dependencies, optimize your code, and a bunch of other stuff.

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.

Ethan Malasky gave a talk on the tour about Developing Secure AIR Applications. In the talk he covers how to update and deploy AIR applications securely and he also gets into the guts of the HTML security sandbox. It’s one of the best talks from the tour so if you’re creating AIR applications, I encourage you to watch the video. He’s also posted his slides from the talk on his blog.

We’ve wrapped things up on the first week of the on AIR Tour Europe and are spending today talking to developers in Prague. The first three stops were Stockholm, Berlin, and Warsaw. We had great crowds at all of them with a lot of good questions and some interesting demos of AIR. Mike Chambers has a recap up on the tour blog as does Serge Jespers. Lee has a rundown of each of the three cities here, here, and here.

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.

We’re doing the final leg of the on AIR Tour Europe in a couple of weeks and so far registration has been great and there are a couple of cities that are sold out but we still have slots in a few of them. If you’re interested in checking out AIR, talking to us about feature requests, and want a free copy of the AIR for JavaScript Developers pocket guide to take home, head over and register.

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.

During our on AIR London event I sat down with Jeremy Baines from Howard/Baines to talk about their AIR application for FriendFeed, AlertThingy. They had no AIR experience before they started and it’s a pure HTML/JavaScript application so he has some good insight on getting started with the platform.

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.

We are announcing the Open Screen Project today in an effort to free up a lot of the restrictions around the Flash Player and make it easy to port to any device you want. We are removing any restrictions on the SWF, FLV, and F4V specifications as well as planning to get rid of the licensing fees for the next major version of the Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices.

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:

• Dave McAllister
• Bill Perry
• CNet news
• VentureBeat

Dion Almaer and I gave a talk at Web 2.0 Expo titled “Taking the Web Offline and On the Desktop” which covered some general information about the space and then drilled down into more details about Google Gears and Adobe AIR. The talk also got into how these two technologies can be complimentary while enabling two different sets of use cases. The slides are up on SlideShare and I’ve embedded them below.

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We’ve got a pocketguide for people who want to build AIR applications with JavaScript available now for download over at Ajaxian. We had a previous version available for the beta but this one has been updated with all of the 1.0 features and changes.

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.

We just released a public version of AIR on Linux as well as the tooling in Flex Builder for Linux to create AIR applications. Adobe really wants to provide full support on Linux for our RIA technologies. We’d love to hear what you think so please submit feedback and help us make the Linux release really fantastic.

Yesterday on TechCrunch was a guest post by Matthew Gertner who works for Prism, a cool technology from Mozilla that lets you create desktop applications out of any website. Matthew does a pretty good job of laying out part of the scene but I think he misses an important point. Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) like Prism are similar but also very different from what AIR does which is let you create real desktop applications with web technologies.

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.