Is Abode AIR really ‘game changing’?
Adobe released AIR (an overloaded word these days in the technology world) this week and its been very well received. There is already a substantial list of AIR applications released with many more to follow I’m sure.
The Flex 3.0 SDK was also released after a long beta period. Flex is a fantastic toolkit, we use it to develop our online financial tools and it rocks. That said, we have no immediate need for AIR, the browser is the platform as far as we’re concerned. Although that’s not to say we won’t have a need for it in the near future, hypothetically users who have security/privacy concerns may be more comfortable downloading and using our tools off-line where their data can be stored locally, so we’re very much keeping AIR in mind (and it’s a fantastic tool to draw upon if needs be).
But, is AIR as ‘game changing’ as Adobe are touting? Not yet in my opinion, and not in itself. If, however, they manage to:
- a) get AIR/Flex apps to run on mobile devices (and Adobe seem to be making great strides here to achieve this). This really would cover all platforms, and bring ‘write once, run anywhere’ to a new level.
- b) develop this ‘C/C++ to ActionScript‘ compiler, which overnight could result in a huge mass of applications that can suddenly be run in Flash Player.
then yes, it really could be ‘game changing’. It’s going to be fascinating to watch. Hats off to Adobe, of all the companies out there they seem to be making the most effort in evolving how software will be developed in the future (and hopefully *all* tools will be on top of an open source and standard specifications foundation).