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:

• A Mac Pro 8Core with 4 gigs ram, 1.5 TB (2×750GB) of storage.
• (2) Dell 2707WFP 27″ widescreen monitors.
• (1) one Sony Playstation 3.
• (1) $200 gift certificate to Amazon.com.
• (1) Herman Miller Aeron chair.
• (1) Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones.
• (1) copy of Adobe Flex™ Builder™ version 3, Macintosh edition.
• (1) copy of Adobe Creative Suite® 3 Master Collection for Macintosh.
• And one squishy stress ball.

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!

Mike Chambers just posted some information on our second leg of the on AIR Bus tour. We’re going to be starting the East Coast leg on August 14th with the event in Atlanta. We all had a great time on the first leg and we got some great feedback about the event. Now that we’re rested up a bit I think all of us are looking forward to the trip.

We’ve got some new sessions also which I think people will be interested in. Ben Forta is going to join us and talk about ColdFusion powered AIR applications and Chafic Kazoun is going to speak on building Flex components. Luckily we also got Christian Cantrell to come along and he’s going to talk about the Embedded Database API which is one of my favorite things that’s in AIR.

All the events are still free, so find the city closest to you and register. Hope to see you there!

We’ve been encouraging people to take the bus APIs and mash things up with them. Programmable Web mentioned the bus APIs earlier last week and now the bus tracking mashup by Oscar Trelles has been made the mashup of the day. It tracks all of the bus’ movements so you can see the path we took and it also tracks where the current bus is. We’ll start back up in Atlanta on the 15th, so hopefully we’ll see you there!

We’re wrapping up the first week of our bus tour and we’ve had three events with great turnout. In Seattle, our only full day session so far, we had some great sessions and saw some great AIR applications. One of the big takeaways that we’ve gotten is that the Ajax community is very interested in AIR. The polling we’ve done indicates that about half of the attendees come from an HTML/JavaScript background. Web developers seem very keen on being able to write for the desktop for a variety of reasons.

We’ve also gotten a taste of what makes a good venue for something like this. So far we’ve done it in places that have a very low key feel to them and I think that has resulted in a good vibe at the tour events. With the exception of Vancouver, where the record breaking heat made it a bit uncomfortable for people, the venues have been excellent. Of course it helps that all of our venues have plenty of free beer to serve, but what’s a tech event without free beer?

At our event in Seattle we got to talk with a lot of developers about Adobe AIR. One of the interesting things is that we had a very JavaScript heavy crowd there which indicates to me that Adobe AIR is getting a lot of interest in broader web circles. It was also surprising to listen to how people want to use AIR and how they see it as fitting into their web application.

One thing people talked about was using AIR to replace a current desktop application entirely. Usually this is a desktop application that currently hooks into web services and there is a web site that gives people another way to interact with the services but development and usage is primarily driven by the desktop client. What makes Adobe AIR compelling for this situation is that desktop development can still be the technology driver, but it’s easy to add features to the web site as you add them to the client. It cuts down on development time and keeps the web experience and the desktop experience in sync.

Another use case is for people who just want to extend their web application a little bit on to the desktop. This is a lot like what Pownce is doing and is one of my favorite Adobe AIR use cases. In this model people don’t want to port their entire application to the desktop but rather bits and pieces of functionality that can only be done with desktop development but will ultimately enhance the web application. As a result, everything ties back to the site and the desktop application acts as more of a hook than anything else with a subset of the web’s features but with the power of a regular desktop application. Being able to do all of this with the same skill set makes it much more accessible to web shops than it was before.

Adobe AIR is a testament to how deep and rich the web is. I think most of us at Adobe see this as a sister technology to your web application and a way to expand what you’re currently giving your users. That’s going to take a lot of forms from porting the whole web application to the desktop down to creating a small widget-like application that brings bits of data to the users desktop. Adobe AIR gives you a lot of options so it’s up to you to figure out what the best fit will be for your application. If you’re in the area for one of our events, we’d love to talk to you about it.

We started rolling at around 6:30 this morning and we’ve been learning a lot as we go (much like a typical startup). We got off to a good start with a lot of data connectivity while we were in San Francisco. Scoble was taking calls and we were talking with people. Then as we got further north the connectivity started getting sporadic and the video and audio seemed pretty jerky. We also don’t have a chat room to go along with the video so we tried a couple of duct-tape solutions but they aren’t working. It’s a shame because there are a lot of people twittering us about wanting to join in and chat.

So we’re working on adding features to the bus. Chat is the glaring omission but we’ve had requests for everything from a separate audio feed to multiple video streams. So far it’s been a fun experience and we really like the suggestions/comments so keep them coming. I just did an interview about AIR over on Download Squad, so if you’re looking for more info about AIR, check it out. And if you’re interested, you’re all more than welcome to come by one of our events and talk to the team and get into building AIR apps. A lot of us on the bus are building apps so you may even get to see some of the things we come up with.

The bus for the on AIR tour is going to be rolling out of San Francisco Monday at 6:00 in the morning and we’re heading for Seattle to be at our event at Elysian Fields on Tuesday the 10th. We’ve been busy getting the bus ready and are planning on spending a good chunk of the weekend putting the finishing touches on it so that you’ll be able to log into the website and see what’s going on in the bus with the live video feed, the Tweets, or the Flickr photoset. All of the events are free, you just have to register.

We’ve also got a very fun crew in store for the bus. Robert Scoble is going to join us from San Francisco to Seattle. Dion Almaer from Ajaxian will be with us until Portland and Mark Piller from MidnightCoders is coming to Seattle and Vancouver with us to talk about .NET and Flex.In the evening during our Seattle event we’re going to be holding Ignite the Web, a series of 5 minute lightning talks with the web as a central theme. We’ve got some cool speakers lined up:

• Peter Armstrong - AIR on Rails
• Brian Eisenberg - The culture of lifecasting and how I started my company from an irc chat room
• Ted Patrick - Twisted Python and flash.net.Socket
• Dion Almaer - Google Gears
• Dan Florio - video.Maru
• Buzz Bruggeman - ActiveWords
• Ted Leung - Open Sorce Web

 I’m still looking for more speakers, so if you’re interested, drop me an email, and make sure to register. The ignite sessions are going to be a great way to get in front of a lot of developers, so it’s great for startups. The tour is going to be a blast and we think that developers are going to learn a lot and have fun at these events, so if you haven’t register, do so now!

When you think of Adobe, you probably think first about Photoshop, then the rest of creative suite, and then probably Flash. But Adobe is really a web company. Our tools are aimed very heavily at web developers and with Adobe AIR we wanted to appeal to all kinds of web developers, both those doing Flash and those doing JavaScript. You don’t have to use Flash to build a desktop application with Adobe AIR. Because we bundled the open source WebKit engine in AIR, you can build a desktop application using only the HTML/JavaScript that you’re used to using on web applications, with no Flash at all.

Recently we’ve been able to show a lot of very cool things with Ajax and Adobe AIR. Our bus tour is chock full of Ajax/AIR sessions so if you’re on the fence for attending one of these events in your city because you think it’s just going to be a Flash-fest, think again, and go register. In addition to Andre Charland from Nitobi, our own evangelists are going to be talking about how to leverage HTML/JavaScript inside of Adobe AIR. In fact, Kevin Hoyt has been working on a bunch of examples to show both how powerful JavaScript and AIR can be and how easy it is to get started. Over on his blog he has 35 different code samples for things like file input/output, using the embedded SQLite database and taking advantage of native window functionality, all being done without Flash.

(more…)

Next week we’re going to be embarking out on the on Air Bus Tour talking to web developers all over the country about Adobe AIR, our cross platform desktop runtime that gives developers the power to build rich internet applications for the desktop with the web skills they already have. The tour itself is shaping up to be a lot of fun and you’ll be able to track us from the tour website. But while we’re on the tour, talking to developers and getting feedback, we wanted a way to share with everyone why we’re all so excited about it, so the on AIR blog was born.

Over the course of the summer and beyond we’re going to be talking about what web developers can do with Adobe AIR and how it’s going to impact the world of Rich Internet Applications. Adobe AIR is aimed at bringing the best of the web to the desktop and augmenting the creativity that’s occurred in the browser by enabling it on the desktop. We’re going to be talking about what kinds of applications are a good fit for Adobe AIR and things to think about as you’re building apps. We’re going to be talking about the conversations we have on the road and how we’re incorporating those into the product. We’ll have reviews, stories and anecdotes from the people we meet and the people on the bus. It should be a great time and I’m looking forward to the conversation.