Alexei@Nitobi

I’m currently at AIR Camp Vancouver, listening to Mike Chambers explain the origins of Adobe’s new cross-platform runtime, AIR. It seems like the long term vision is not just limited to PC/Mac/Linux, but also other devices.. creating opportunities for true cross-platform write-once, run-anywhere development.

I was thinking a little bit about my post yesterday, and about how Adobe should be distributing the AIR runtime. I still think they need to allow developers to bundle the runtime into a single executable (if that’s even possible), but I just realized that maybe one of the biggest barriers will be convincing people the runtime is OK. This will take time, but also lots of marketing, and thats why Adobe is somewhat-uniquely positioned (along with others in their cohort, like Microsoft, Apple maybe, and a couple others) to wage the necessary marketing war to convince people its ok to have the runtime installed and running on their computer, all “black box” like.. Adobe is a trustworthy source (I wouldnt install a similar tool from DoubleClick), and I think they can get people over the hurdle of being concerned that this is a safe runtime to have in their operating system, marshalling all these anonymous applications and making sure they don’t do anything too insane..

Again, if you haven’t heard about AIR, and especially if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s free, grab the beta here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Incidentally, Beta 2 of AIR is on it’s way.. and will support things like icon bounding in MacOS, and taskbar support on PC

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:46 pm and is filed under web development, air, onairbustour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.