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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.