24 ways has a tutorial for getting started on your first Ajax AIR application by Jonathan Snook. It’s titled Christmas Is In the AIR and will give you everything you need to know to start building HTML/Ajax applications on the AIR runtime. It walks you through setting up the application descriptor file and also using the new HTML security model. It’s a very, very good tutorial and I hope it gets you excited about checking AIR out over the Christmas break.

Kevin Hoyt, the Ajax master on the AIR team has updated all of his Ajax samples to run on AIR Beta 3. We made a lot of changes with AIR beta 2 around Ajax and security but for the most part Beta 3 was just bug fixes with the exception of drag and drop. So if you’re just starting out on AIR or there’s something you want to see how to do on the Ajax side, subscribe to Kevin’s blog and check out the samples.

Ooyala, a company that is making a lot of use of AIR, won the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge last week. I wrote about Ooyala’s use of Adobe AIR in their Backlot application over on the Universal Desktop. Even though AIR is a desktop runtime, the web is the most important component of any rich Internet application including those on the desktop. AIR and Amazon Web Services make for a great combination and Ooyala is a perfect example of that.

[Via Andre Charland]