on AIR Bus Tour Boston: Keynote
Ryan Stewart gave the keynote as part of the on AIR Bus Tour here in Boston.
Adobe has primarily become a web company. Flash penetration is happening quickly, Flex is gaining ground, and other standards like PDF are being used everywhere.
Adobe has lately been focusing on: Runtime Performance (AVM2 and AS3), Development Model (Flex and Flex Builder), and Desktop Runtime (AIR). I'd also add that the CS3 enhancements for Flash/Flex sharing are another great example of recent improvements.
AIR is focusing on existing standards. Gives the ability to create an AIR application without needing to touch Flash at all, can be entirely HTML and JavaScript. The real advantage of AIR is the tight integration, like having JavaScript call Flash and vice versa. One of the key technologies included in AIR is WebKit, the same HTML rendering engine behind Safari. Better support for PDF will be included in later AIR releases.
AIR enables desktop interaction through AIR specific APIs for accessing the file system, network detection, notifications, application updates, drag and drop (with the host OS), and local databases using SQLite. More details in the AIR API Overview.
AIR support is currently only for Mac and Windows. Linux version should exist after 1.0 release. I think not having Linux out of the gate is sad, but nice to know they do have a road map which includes intended support for it.
Next up were a bunch of demos showing AIR applications. Some of them extended an existing website down to the desktop to make interaction easier and provide capabilities not available in a browser only experience.
finetune.com: Site is a combination of AJAX and Flash. AIR application extends music capabilities onto the desktop. Able to reuse most of the code. Hook into iTunes XML file to drive what music it will play. Shared profile information between website and desktop.
pownce: Micro blogging website. AIR application allows sending data by dragging and dropping it from the host OS. Website is in AJAX but they wrote the AIR application in Flex to provide additional flexible.
simple tasks: Quick AIR application thrown together using HTML and JavaScript.
buzzword: Still in private betas. Originally build in Flex as an online word processor. Created an entire text rendering engine in AS3 (possible because of the speed of AVM2). Document sharing, comments, fully WYSIWYG editing, and online/offline synchronizing.
Adobe Media Player: New way to deliver video content to users through channels.
airapps.pbwiki.com: Registry of publicly available AIR applications. People are encouraged to add links to their application.
At the upcoming MAX conference (more information below) Adobe will release Beta 2 of AIR and announce the winners of AIR Dev Derby contest. There is still time to enter the derby, deadline September 5, 2007.
If you can only make it to one conference, the MAX conference September 30 - October 3, 2007 in Chicago is highly recommended.