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.

Because desktop development is hard. In order to build desktop applications you have to be a pretty good programmer because there is so much other stuff to worry about. Obviously being a good programmer is never a bad thing but it does raise the barrier to entry. And it’s a lot of work to create desktop applications. You’ve got to work with potentially hundreds of native operating system APIs and when you’re done, your application runs only on the operating system you coded it for.

Contrast that with web development. Web development is easy. You can throw some HMTL/JavaScript on a page and *BAM* instant gratification. And usually it just works. You can use any browser anywhere to see your creation. That ease of use and quick results makes web development a lot more fun. That’s been a huge driver in the popularity of web applications. In some ways web development is development for the every-person. And people have absolutely flocked to develop for the web. It’s cross-platform, it’s fun, and its easy. So that’s where all the innovation has gone: straight into the web browser. And if you look at the past 5 years it’s hard to argue that letting more people develop has been bad. We’ve got some really fantastic web applications out there and we’ve changed the economy and the world in the process. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

So was the desktop medium the problem? Nope, it was just the development model. What if we could take the ease/cross-platform/fun development model of the web and provide desktop functionality? That’s exactly what rich Internet applications on the desktop are trying to do and that’s Adobe AIR’s goal. There are a lot of different approaches to the “new desktop” development model and they’re all good. But desktop development isn’t just about offline access or having a desktop shortcut. It’s about capturing the full experience of web development and providing the ability to create powerful, persistent, usable desktop applications. I want to see the same level of innovation that we saw in the browser now happen on the desktop because in the end, there is no arguing that the desktop is a more powerful platform than the web browser. It has more functionality and you can still take advantage of what makes the web so great. RIAs on the desktop just get rid of some of the problems with developing for the desktop. Go give it a shot. The desktop can be fun again.

I’ve been messing around with uploading video this week and it’s kind of a pain. For one thing, the file sizes seem huge, on the order of 50-150 megs. I’ve got decently fast broadband, but uploading still takes a bit of time (20-40 minutes) and I do a lot of things in my browser because I’m a hard-core multitasker. So I’m dealing with big file sizes and trying to upload them inside a browser window. It’s been a bad combination. My file will stop transferring, the browser has crashed a couple of times. It’s just a bad experience.

AIR is a great solution here. This isn’t just taking a web application offline, it’s helping the user. Having direct access to the filesystem makes the upload experience much, much better. For one thing, you aren’t dependent on the browser. Why wait 40 minutes to upload your file when you could be browsing around being (un)productive? Download crashes? Why not have an application that knows exactly how many bytes were uploaded so it can pick up where it left off? With AIR you can do all of this using web technologies so you don’t have to have any knowledge for building desktop applications. You can pretty quickly create an AIR app that ties back to your server, with code you’ve already written, tools you’re already using, and assets you’ve already got. Plus, it’s all cross platform.

As more and more people start doing higher and higher quality video, we need to get a better upload experience.

Cross-posted from my personal blog

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.

Adobe AIR 1.0 and Flex 3! We released Adobe AIR and Flex today along with a host of other great things. We have created an open source portal so you can keep track of the large number of open source projects at Adobe.

This is a big release. With Flex 3 we made a lot of enhancements to a very powerful RIA framework. Adobe AIR allows developers of both Flash and Ajax to take all of their skills and create desktop applications. That means you’ll be able to do things with your web applications that the browser doesn’t currently support but you can still be sure that it will run cross-platform and consistently. We’ve got a ton of great example applications on the AIR Marketplace and we’ll be talking a lot more with members of the community at Adobe Engage today.

We just announced the dates for On AIR Europe and we’re hitting 12 cities across Europe over a 4 week time span. Instead of bringing the bus along we’re going to be doing a train tour but you’ll still be able to follow us over the live feed, Twitter, and the chat. We’re really looking forward to meeting and talking with the web development community in Europe so hopefully you can join us for one of the events. We’ve got a Facebook page set up as well as a list of all the events on Upcoming. Here’s the full list:

• Madrid - 31 March
• Paris - 2 April
• Amsterdam - 4 April
• Brussels - 7 April
• London - 9 April
• Dublin - 11 April
• Stockholm - 2 June
• Berlin - 4 June
• Warsaw - 6 June
• Prague - 9 June
• Munich - 11 June
• Milan - 13 June

Web 2.0 is a great place with some really cool applications. But there are 5 companies out there that I’d love to see do something with AIR:

Yelp: One of my favorite services. Why do I want an AIR app from Yelp? A few reasons. One, I’m really bad at sitting down and remembering what I ate. I’d love to have a Yelp desktop application that would let me take notes about a specific restaurant as soon as I get home. Then when I have time the notes are on my hard drive and I can finish the review and send it up when I get a chance. I’d also like notifications. When I get a message, compliment or a review for one of my favorite restaurants it would be great to get a notification. Finally, I really want a .yelp file that I can email around or download. The .yelp file would contain all of the major info about the restaurant and would be associated with the AIR application and view it online or offline. Ideally it would be XML so you could even add info to it and do a kind of desktop mashup with other services.

Dopplr: The big one for Doppler? Alerts. The weekly emails are great (and I know I can increase the frequency) but having alerts would be awesome. I would also love to have a Dopplr desktop widget that would let me easily browse other people’s trips without having to go to the Dopplr site. A quick entry feature would also be very cool. Click on the Dopplr icon in the system tray (or dock) and be entering a new trip right away. Ideally, since Dopplr would have access to the file system, you could also sync it with different calendar applications or (because I like filetypes) a .dopplr File type that you could send to friends and they’d be able to use that file to add the same trip you have. The theme of the desktop application could even change color based on where you’re going just like the logo does.

NewsGator This would be the perfect AIR application. I’m now addicted to using NewsGator in the browser when I have to and using a combination of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire on the desktop. Why not combine those code bases? Why not enhance the experience of the browser client and make it look and feel like the desktop applications? You can use the file system or the SQLite database in AIR to store your feeds and synchronize them when you get online. You have the exact same UI and code base for Mac and Windows plus you get to take that code and create a similar and great looking web interface. News reading would never look so good or be so easy. Your feeds when and where you want them with a consistent user interface.

Facebook: Yup, what can I say, I try to be a power user and I want a desktop application for Facebook. This I want just for the experience. I want an Ajaxy or Flashy interface with cool transitions that makes doing tasks like managing messages or friend requests easier. I want to synchronize my contacts automatically with my email using the file system APIs. I want uploading photos and videos to be really easy. You can still display ads for me, that’s fine, but I want a robust interface that helps me use Facebook faster and more easily.

Desktop Tower Defense Okay, maybe this one seems silly, but think about it. You could use transparent windows and the power of Flash to play Desktop Tower Defense on your desktop. You could also take the game with you wherever you go so you can play it on the airplane or wherever you need to waste time without an internet connection. You could save your games or even record them so you can show them off to your friends later. Wasting time was never as easy as it could be with DTD on AIR