Mike Chambers just unveiled the new logo for Adobe AIR. This is the final logo and we tried to incorporate a lot of what AIR is into it. As Mike says:
Adobe AIR is built on top of three core web technologies (HTML, Flash and PDF), and we wanted the logo to represent this. Thus, each corner of the logo represents one of these core technologies.
Enjoy the new logo:
Doug Sharp emailed me to tell me about a game he’s building called ChipWits II. He actually wrote ChipWits I on a Mac back in 1984 and thought AIR was a good excuse to do another version. In the game you program a robot using icons and breakpoints. The graphical programming language teaches the basics of development in a fun and engaging way. If you have kids, I’d encourage you to download this and let them check it out.
Doug entered ChipWits II in the Independent Games Festival this year. I think he has a winner.
Eric Natzke is one of the leading interactive artist of our day so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that he’s using AIR to help him make his creative visions come to life. Eric’s been working on a project with AIR and CS3 in which he takes photographs and creates very cool surreal artwork based on them. Using the colors from the image and a series of concentric circles, he creates a very cool looking version of the original photograph.
He describes his process a bit in the comments of this Flickr photo but he essentially manipulates the photo in Flash CS3. He then uses AIR to export those as PNGs. Because it’s all dynamic and he’s making sure he has super-high res (400 megs) AIR lets him get all of his artwork out of Flash. He then combines them using Photoshop. Very, very cool use of CS3 and AIR together. I want him to do some of my photos.
Mozilla announced Prism on their labs site today, a re-branded version of WebRunner that helps take your browser applications to the desktop. It has some important differences from Adobe AIR but there are also a lot of interesting similarities that prove people are interested in bringing the web to the desktop.
The differences mostly lie in the way the two runtimes come at the same problem. Prism is basically taking existing web applications and giving them a desktop feel with things like their own window, a place on the system tray/start menu, and a pretty easy way to turn any web site into a desktop application. AIR on the other hand is more desktop centric. In addition to all the branding aspects of having an app on the desktop you also get some important functionality such as access to the file system, the ability to associate files with your AIR application and a standard install/uninstall process.
What’s cool is that both Adobe AIR and Prism will let you take your existing application and port it to the desktop with little or no code changes. They also both use HTML and JavaScript. Prism obviously uses Firefox’s HTML rendering engine, while Adobe AIR uses WebKit. So with both runtimes you can take any Ajax application out there today and turn it into a desktop application. Depending on the feature set and experience you’re looking for you can choose what delivery mechanism is best for you.
Darryl Taft has a cool write up of the bus tour and lots of good quotes from Mike Chambers. We’re getting ready to roll again (I fly out to New York on Saturday) for the last leg of the tour. The New York City and Toronto events are sold out and the other cities are filling up quickly. When it’s all done we’re rolling into MAX and getting ready to show off everything Adobe’s been working on this year. Should be a lot of fun.
Joe Johnston recently took the Ribbit component and added to the iPhone application he’s been building with Adobe AIR. The Ribbit component supports making or receiving phone calls directly from the Flash Player. Because AIR has all the capabilities of the player, Joe was able to take the component and add it to his pre-existing code to give it functionality.
Check out the YouTube videos here and here. Keep in mind this is all just AIR and Flash.
Andre Charland was feeling a little bit of Mac-envy while on the bus tour so he deiced to take his Ajax skills and Adobe AIR and do something about it. The result was a Mac dock that uses Nitobi’s Fish Eye Component.
You’ll notice that a lot of the icons in the screenshot point to web applications which I thought was funny/ironic. The Nitobi guys do a lot of their work using web apps but for something like a launcher, AIR gave them what they wanted on the desktop.
This isn’t what I would consider the ideal use case for AIR, but it’s a cool demo and it does bridge the web and the desktop.
We announced today that we’re releasing an update for Flash Player that will support the H.264 codec that has become almost a de facto standard for video content. What’s great is that this will also go into the Adobe AIR beta 2 release that we’ll be dropping at MAX later this year. That means you’ll be able to play most H.264 content right inside your AIR application.
Tinic Uro has a great post about what the new functionality means. As a developer you use the exact same APIs that you use right now to stream and display FLV. As Tinic notes, you can even put H.264 streams into an FLV but you have to make sure the sequence headers are handled correctly. The AAC support is also really neat because you can do native AAC playback and you use the same NetStream API that you use to connect to video so the sound and video APIs sync up a bit now which I think will be helpful going forward. As Tinic says, “We are now getting into a situation where there is not much difference between audio and video files anymore. “.
One application which will gain a ton from this is the Adobe Media Player (AMP). Because you can load .mov, .mp4, m4v, .m4a, and .3gp files directly into both the browser based player and Adobe AIR, you’ll be able to distribute all of your H.264 encoded media to users of AMP. With all of the H.264 media out there (and remember Europe is standardizing TV around H.264) you’ll have a ton of content at your disposal as an AMP user. With H.264 and AAC, Adobe AIR is going to be a fantastic media platform for you to build on.
So by now you’ve (hopefully) been checking out Adobe AIR and you’ve built a couple of sample applications. We want you to take it to the next level so we’re holding the Adobe AIR Developer Derby. The goal is to build the most unique Adobe AIR application and the grand prize is a travel gift certificate worth $100,000 that you can use wherever you want.
There are five categories which also have a single winner who walks away with one of the coolest developer setups ever:
We’ve got categories for best Business Application (with both a HTML and Flash winner), best Community Application (with a winner for both HTML and Flash) and finally one Wild Card winner which doesn’t fit into one of the two groups above but is still done in AIR and worthy of a prize. Check out the contest page and official rules for more info. The deadline is September 5th at 11:59 PM Pacific Time so start coding!
During the bus tour we had Dion Almaer, Andre Charland, and Kevin Hoyt in the back of the bus together so I took a chance to ask them a few questions about where AIR fits in the Ajax world. There is some great stuff in the video and we had a lot of these kinds of conversations on the bus. This was one of the few we got on video, but hopefully we’ll have more of that on the second leg. I apologize about the bounce - it’s hard to do camera on a moving bus.
