02.25.2008 – The Day the Web Got Much Bigger
Today is a pretty big day. To be totally honest, today is the reason I joined Adobe. Today is the release of Adobe AIR and Flex 3. The New York Times has a great article about what AIR enables and why it’s going to have an impact on the technology landscape. AIR is a product that will help bridge the gap between the web and the desktop. The web is incredibly exciting but the desktop is far from dead. And Adobe is in the thick of a movement that will help bridge the gap between web and desktop. Adobe loves the web. The goal with AIR is to take the good, tried and true from the web, and help enhance the desktop. The web is a powerful platform and building on top of it is something beneficial to all web developers. AIR provides that extra functionality to bring the web and the desktop together.
The fantastic response is a validation of the platform in my mind. We’ve got applications from the New York Times (great interview with the ShifD folks), eBay, FedEx, AOL, and startups like Aviary, uvLayer, and numerous others. It’s exciting to see what people can do when the boundaries of the web expand.
This is also about the future of Adobe. Adobe has helped create a very powerful platform that combines the web and the desktop. The goal is that our customers will create some really compelling applications on top of it. But it also gives Adobe room to grow. We’ve always built great software and we want to enable developers to create on top of that platform. But now that the groundwork has been laid, think of the other things Adobe can do. We now have a very rich, interactive platform to deploy applications. We can start offering helpful capabilities like we do with online/offline synchronization and LiveCycle Data Services. Think about how we can offer additional features on top of our platform. Look at how Buzzword could be enhanced. Look at what we could do with Share and CoCoMo. All of those depend on the Adobe platform and AIR opens up those features on both the web and the desktop. There are some exciting things in store.
[tags]Adobe AIR, Flex, Flash, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]
Posted in Adobe, Flex, Rich Internet Applications
February 25th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Aaaaaah fi – na – ly
A warm fuzzy fealing
Congrats!
February 25th, 2008 at 4:21 am
I actually put the headline like this: The day web and desktop unite
Congrats on the great job.
February 25th, 2008 at 7:10 am
A great leap foward, AIR truly sets a new standard.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:29 am
So if 50 of my favorite websites create an AIR version of their site then after downloading and installing it, I have an icon for each individual AIR Application. So let’s say I have a folder on my desktop called “Air Apps” with my 50 different icons. I need to open this folder, and then find the icon for the app. I want to launch? What if I have 1000 sites with AIR versions? Why not have a single AIR application that can open AIR sites. This single AIR application could have multiple instances of it open … Maybe I’m confused?
February 25th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Ryan,
It certainly is interesting. I’m an enterprise guy leading a small IT shop for a pharmaceutical (I am however not a coder). We have been dabbling in AJAX-style apps but find that standards aren’t great and integration can be a little painful. Plus there are limitations. I’ve been looking for that bridge between web and desktop for some time – fat is not generally the way to go – too much infrastructure code for little benefit + deployment issues + we want to build point solutions not monster software. This looks like it might be the ticket. I expect it to work well on ‘thin’ platforms like…well, like the iPod Touch (once an SDK appears). Like to see this integrate with SAP. I can think of a couple of great apps right off the bat.