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Ars Techinca: Breathe in the Adobe AIR

March 3rd, 2008 by Ryan Stewart

Ars Technica has a very good review of AIR. They hit all of the main points and I think they have a good sense of what the goals with AIR are. We’re not trying to be the ultimate desktop platform right out of the box, but we are trying to make the desktop more accessible to web developers in a cross-platform, web-centric way. I think it’s a great start and as we grow the features of the platform, we’ll get closer and closer to the ultimate goal. If you have specific enhancement requests, we would love to hear them. Here’s the conclusion that Ars Techinca came to about AIR:

Our tests show that Adobe AIR is a relatively promising solution for RIA development, but it has some limitations that make it less flexible and scalable than alternatives. Those limitations may not be all that relevant in practice, however, because AIR is more than capable of meeting the needs of its target audience. Developers who attempt to stretch AIR beyond its core competencies will likely be disappointed with the results, but there is plenty of demand for the kind of applications that fit very neatly within the scope of its capabilities: developing site-specific browsers and creating simple desktop interfaces to remote web services.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Adobe AIR.

3 Responses to “Ars Techinca: Breathe in the Adobe AIR”

  1. On March 3rd, 2008 at 2:09 pm, Luke wrote:

    “I think it’s a great start and as we grow the features of the platform, we’ll get closer and closer to the ultimate goal.”

    Sorry to ask but, what’s that ultimate goal?

  2. On March 3rd, 2008 at 7:48 pm, Tony Fendall wrote:

    World domination of course :)

  3. On March 4th, 2008 at 12:47 am, Greg wrote:

    If you’re asking for suggestions for new APIs/features for future versions of AIR, here’s mine:

    Support for more media codecs, so that AIR can be used to build media management applications.

    Support for the new CSS animation/transformation features in webkit nightlies. Animation is no big shakes, since it can be done in js, but the transformation features rock and allow for some pretty unique, eye-catching UIs.

    Finer-grained control of typography in html, so that desktop publishing apps can be written for AIR (possibly not something Adobe wants to encourage :).

    3D apis, so that games can be written for AIR. OpenGL is the obvious candidate here.

    A helpfile api that integrates with the OS when possible.

    API support for zipfiles (zlib support is there, but just for unstructured bytearrays).

    Some possibly useful things: tools to help with syncing a local database with a remote one, openid support, help with undo/redo, a Adobe-provided code hosting service that integrates with the update api.

    Just some ideas off the top of my head. AIR already kicks ass.

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