Ars Technica has an interview with Ed Finkler, the guy behind the AIR-derby-winning Twitter client, Spaz. In the interview Ed gets asked why he chose AIR as a platform and his response captures what I think is going to make AIR such a game changer in the development world (long response but worth it):
I enjoyed toying with desktop apps from time to time. I liked the OS X platform for development a lot, but I wasn’t really into Obj-C much as a language, so I ended up doing a couple things in RealBasic. Some folks might remember a LAME-based mp3 encoder/CD ripper called LameBrain; that was one of my projects.
Early this year I really got an itch to revisit desktop app development, and a Twitter client seemed like a good choice. The service was something I used from time to time, and it had a simple, powerful API. Spaz’s early incarnation was built in RealBasic, and while I don’t think it was much to look at, it was functional (not sure I could say more than that).
One of the things I discovered early in making desktop apps is that certain things that are simple to do on the web are enormously< difficult in a desktop app. Getting user pics to display next to posts was a great challenge, because you can't just say "grab the image from this URL." You have to do all the heavy lifting the browser would do for you on a web page, like retrieving the image via HTTP, loading it into memory, drawing the image into the correct location, and caching the image--and you have to do it "asynchronously," so you can retrieve more than one at a time, and you don't have to wait for the process to complete to scroll your timeline or whatnot.
Eventually I hit a roadblock: I wanted to have URLs inside "tweets" be clickable. This looked like it was going to be next to impossible, or at very least so difficult that it wasn't worth the time. Spaz didn't get worked on for a few weeks because it seemed like a dead-end.
My first proof-of-concept was an AIR app built on Beta 1 that just loaded and displayed the Twitter public timeline, auto-refreshing every minute. Getting that working was surprisingly easy, in part because I was using the Spry JS framework from Adobe, which makes grabbing data from various sources and displaying it in HTML a piece of cake. That early prototype looked much better than the original Spaz, and it was much, much faster to develop.
In some ways, AIR is about a lot of things, but one of those things is about letting web developers create real desktop applications easily. Ed discovered that and a lot more people are as well. For more info on AIR you can check out Oliver Goldman’s article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Oliver is one of the main engineers behind AIR and his blog is also chock full of good AIR stuff.
[tags]AIR, Development, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]
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