Mike Chambers just posted the video of Kevin Lynch’s keynote at the Seattle event. In the keynote Kevin gives an overview of Adobe AIR, shows off some of the applications people are building with it and talks about the Adobe Platform. Enjoy!
You can find additional dates for AIR Camp here.
We’ve been encouraging people to take the bus APIs and mash things up with them. Programmable Web mentioned the bus APIs earlier last week and now the bus tracking mashup by Oscar Trelles has been made the mashup of the day. It tracks all of the bus’ movements so you can see the path we took and it also tracks where the current bus is. We’ll start back up in Atlanta on the 15th, so hopefully we’ll see you there!
Earlier this week Scoble posted a video that he took while he was on the bus from San Francisco to Seattle. In the video he interviews us about Adobe AIR and he gets some footage of the inside of the bus. You also get to meet everyone who came with us which is kind of cool.
Alan Lewis from eBay is one of the main guys behind what is probably the most famous AIR project we have right now, the San Dimas application that eBay built to give their users a different experience that was custom made for the desktop. He’s with us here in Los Angeles and he gave a session titled Lessons Learned from Developing on AIR. Because San Dimas was the first big AIR application out there, Alan and his team had to do a lot of thinking about how to build a rich desktop application with AIR. He has posted about his talk and five lessons that he took away from the process. It’s a great read for anyone who is building AIR apps or thinking of doing so.
Flash games are hugely popular. Digg has an entire category for them and the people behind one of the most popular, Desktop Tower Defense, recently announced that they’re planning a startup based around Flash games. I’ve been thinking a lot about how Adobe AIR can appeal to that market and I think it’s going to be a very compelling platform for game developers who are already using Flash.
One thing to be aware of is that you won’t really be able to use Flash 8 inside of AIR. You can access the code in your Flash 8 SWF from AIR with LocalConnection but you won’t be able to take advantage of the APIs, which is one of the major reasons to use Adobe AIR. As a game developer, you have a lot inside of AIR that can help you create more feature rich games. By taking your Flash work outside of the browser and bringing it to the desktop, it becomes just like native OS games which can really boost both popularity and monetization.
One of the most obvious benefits is to be able to run the Flash games offline so users can play them whenever they want. But it’s more than that. With Adobe AIR you have access to the hard drive and the full system. You could create a multiplayer client that runs in the background and pops up a system notification when someone challenges you. You can enable the ability to save a game on the hard drive and have it synchronize to the web so that your users have access to their saved games wherever they are whether that’s on an airplane or a computer at school. By breaking out of the browser you can also do more with the game. You can create a transparent background, create a custom user interface/window, run it with command line arguments and give it a custom icon and put it in the games menu with all of the other games.
There are going to be a lot of cool uses for Adobe AIR, but one of the ones I’m most looking forward to are games. I can’t wait to see what you cook up.
We’re wrapping up the first week of our bus tour and we’ve had three events with great turnout. In Seattle, our only full day session so far, we had some great sessions and saw some great AIR applications. One of the big takeaways that we’ve gotten is that the Ajax community is very interested in AIR. The polling we’ve done indicates that about half of the attendees come from an HTML/JavaScript background. Web developers seem very keen on being able to write for the desktop for a variety of reasons.
We’ve also gotten a taste of what makes a good venue for something like this. So far we’ve done it in places that have a very low key feel to them and I think that has resulted in a good vibe at the tour events. With the exception of Vancouver, where the record breaking heat made it a bit uncomfortable for people, the venues have been excellent. Of course it helps that all of our venues have plenty of free beer to serve, but what’s a tech event without free beer?
At our event in Seattle we got to talk with a lot of developers about Adobe AIR. One of the interesting things is that we had a very JavaScript heavy crowd there which indicates to me that Adobe AIR is getting a lot of interest in broader web circles. It was also surprising to listen to how people want to use AIR and how they see it as fitting into their web application.
One thing people talked about was using AIR to replace a current desktop application entirely. Usually this is a desktop application that currently hooks into web services and there is a web site that gives people another way to interact with the services but development and usage is primarily driven by the desktop client. What makes Adobe AIR compelling for this situation is that desktop development can still be the technology driver, but it’s easy to add features to the web site as you add them to the client. It cuts down on development time and keeps the web experience and the desktop experience in sync.
Another use case is for people who just want to extend their web application a little bit on to the desktop. This is a lot like what Pownce is doing and is one of my favorite Adobe AIR use cases. In this model people don’t want to port their entire application to the desktop but rather bits and pieces of functionality that can only be done with desktop development but will ultimately enhance the web application. As a result, everything ties back to the site and the desktop application acts as more of a hook than anything else with a subset of the web’s features but with the power of a regular desktop application. Being able to do all of this with the same skill set makes it much more accessible to web shops than it was before.
Adobe AIR is a testament to how deep and rich the web is. I think most of us at Adobe see this as a sister technology to your web application and a way to expand what you’re currently giving your users. That’s going to take a lot of forms from porting the whole web application to the desktop down to creating a small widget-like application that brings bits of data to the users desktop. Adobe AIR gives you a lot of options so it’s up to you to figure out what the best fit will be for your application. If you’re in the area for one of our events, we’d love to talk to you about it.
We started rolling at around 6:30 this morning and we’ve been learning a lot as we go (much like a typical startup). We got off to a good start with a lot of data connectivity while we were in San Francisco. Scoble was taking calls and we were talking with people. Then as we got further north the connectivity started getting sporadic and the video and audio seemed pretty jerky. We also don’t have a chat room to go along with the video so we tried a couple of duct-tape solutions but they aren’t working. It’s a shame because there are a lot of people twittering us about wanting to join in and chat.
So we’re working on adding features to the bus. Chat is the glaring omission but we’ve had requests for everything from a separate audio feed to multiple video streams. So far it’s been a fun experience and we really like the suggestions/comments so keep them coming. I just did an interview about AIR over on Download Squad, so if you’re looking for more info about AIR, check it out. And if you’re interested, you’re all more than welcome to come by one of our events and talk to the team and get into building AIR apps. A lot of us on the bus are building apps so you may even get to see some of the things we come up with.
The bus for the on AIR tour is going to be rolling out of San Francisco Monday at 6:00 in the morning and we’re heading for Seattle to be at our event at Elysian Fields on Tuesday the 10th. We’ve been busy getting the bus ready and are planning on spending a good chunk of the weekend putting the finishing touches on it so that you’ll be able to log into the website and see what’s going on in the bus with the live video feed, the Tweets, or the Flickr photoset. All of the events are free, you just have to register.
We’ve also got a very fun crew in store for the bus. Robert Scoble is going to join us from San Francisco to Seattle. Dion Almaer from Ajaxian will be with us until Portland and Mark Piller from MidnightCoders is coming to Seattle and Vancouver with us to talk about .NET and Flex.In the evening during our Seattle event we’re going to be holding Ignite the Web, a series of 5 minute lightning talks with the web as a central theme. We’ve got some cool speakers lined up:
I’m still looking for more speakers, so if you’re interested, drop me an email, and make sure to register. The ignite sessions are going to be a great way to get in front of a lot of developers, so it’s great for startups. The tour is going to be a blast and we think that developers are going to learn a lot and have fun at these events, so if you haven’t register, do so now!
If you’ve been on the Adobe AIR labs page and downloaded the runtime, you’ve probably seen both our sample apps section and our showcase site. Both have good examples of what AIR can do and are excellent resources for anyone who wants to see what AIR is all about (and the sample apps page shows how good the install experience is). But those pages are all basically static and the community has been busy building all kinds of Adobe AIR applications that don’t show up there.
Luckily there are two excellent sites to check out if you’re looking for more applications: ApolloHunter and AIRApps.ApolloHunter is a pretty straightforward application repository. You can comment on and rate different applications and as a result it’s easy to view the most popular applications on the site (though some of the older apps are running on the alpha runtime, not the most recent beta). AIRApps is more of a community for Adobe AIR. It has forums, a chat room, tutorials all in addition to the AIR application database. Both have a lot of different types of applications for you to check out and show the range of things that AIR enables.
