jonathan stegall

Today, Adobe AIR comes out of beta. AIR allows designers and developers to create web applications that run on the desktop. There have been little tastes of this, from the OSX and Yahoo widgets, to the Vista Gadgets, but none of these are full-featured applications that run on the desktop.

Other than that, desktop applications have not been web applications. Developers have had to know desktop programming to create them, and they haven’t really had access to data that resides online. At least, not as part of their core functionality.

With AIR, full web applications can also be full desktop applications. It’s been an interesting thing to watch all this develop, and I look forward to coming up with ways of using it.

For what it’s worth, the example that first made me interested in this was the eBay Desktop. Worth a look, especially now that beta is over.

Over the weekend, Adobe released the Beta version of AIR, which I think is a worse name than Apollo was. Maybe they’ll rename it before it comes out of Beta. Anyway, they’ve also announced a bus tour across the United States to promote AIR.

This free event will teach developers how to make AIR applications out of existing Flex, presumably Flash, or HTML/JavaScript applications. They’ve got food, drink, and lots of good information about designing applications that are freaking awesome.

I look forward to this event.