At the on AIR event here in Madrid just hours after the AIR Linux alpha hit Adobe Labs, Enrique demoed it to the crowd. He had Ubuntu set up as a VM and dragged an AIR file (Twhirl) from his OS X desktop onto the Ubuntu image and installed it. Same code, same AIR file, same experience, two different operating systems. With the alpha release we finally have public versions of AIR for the three major platforms.

I am really, really stoked about what this means for RIAs and specifically, what it means for me. I love Ubuntu. The Linux experience has come a long way from a few years ago. Ubuntu is easy to use, it’s good looking, and it gives me just the right blend of terminal and GUI. I like feeling a little bit hard core because I miss the days of the DOS command prompt. Ubuntu gives me that feeling with the right blend of usability and geek cred. It’s the first time in a very long time that I’ve actually had fun using an operating system. But you can’t fully make the switch to Linux because there aren’t a lot of applications that run on it. And those that do tend not to be as good as some of the more polished applications for Mac and Windows. The customer base of Mac/Win means more people are going to build apps for those platforms and not for Linux. So it’s hard to jump right in.

But now, with Adobe AIR? You can write those applications and still target Mac/Win but you get Linux for free. I hope over the next 6-12 months most of the applications I use are AIR based. If that’s the case, it will mean I can spend more and more of my time in Linux. Between AIR applications and browser applications it will be pretty easy to start giving Linux a big shot. And I can’t wait.

[tags]AIR, Adobe AIR, Linux, Ubuntu, Twhirl[/tags]

We launched Photoshop Express tonight and the early reviews seem to be pretty positive with a couple of odd blemishes (the terms of service seems very odd). I’ve been playing around with it a bit tonight and I’m pretty impressed. I’ve seen it demoed a few times and really like the ability to roll over varying degrees of an effect to see exactly how your picture will look before you edit (pop color is sweeeeet). That’s all still there. We’ve also got some social networking integration so you can quickly edit Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa (Flickr is coming soon I hear). All in all, it’s a great Flex/Flash RIA and it shows off one of Adobe’s strength’s – image editing. So while I’m a little bit bummed to be competing with great Flex applications like Picnik, I’m excited about how the space is shaping up.

This is also a really big move for Adobe. This is some of the logic behind our CS products (Photoshop) running inside a browser. We actually took some of the brains behind various Photoshop filters and used them to help rewrite some of that in AS3. It’s one of Adobe’s very first hosted services and while we don’t have the APIs yet, those will be coming soon as well. So you can store, edit, and manage your photos all using Adobe’s hardware and infrastructure. Soon you’ll be able to use our programming models (and others) to create rich experiences around that. And because we have both great tools and a great platform, you’ll see an offline/AIR version of Photoshop Express down the road which I think has the potential to show off what we think the next generation of software looks like – multiple ways to access your data stored in the cloud but accessible locally when you need it. And it’s all using the same programming model so we can reuse a lot of code. It’s an exciting time and I can’t wait to see the rest of Adobe’s properties explore the world of online hosted services on top of Adobe’s platform.

[tags]Adobe, Flex, Flash, Photoshop Express[/tags]

There’s a great post by Ed Burnette over on ZDNet about how the desktop is dead. And he makes a compelling point:

Installing and uninstalling and maintaining anything on the desktop (be it Windows or Mac or Linux) is hard, and more and more people won’t bother. Why? Because there’s a better alternative. Another way of saying this is, the browser is the new desktop.

Ed is exactly right, the desktop is hard. It’s hard to maintain, it’s hard to install, and it’s harder to develop for. The browser is easy. But the path of least resistance is usually not the best path to follow as Robert Frost so eloquently reminds us. I think Ed’s article is a great post to promote Adobe AIR, one reason why this rebuttal isn’t going on ZDNet. The trend across the industry has been to make the desktop easier. The desktop is more powerful, there are more options, so how can we make the desktop experience better for end users and developers.

That’s something I think AIR solves very well. You’re building RIAs, the same kinds you build in the browser, but you can easily add desktop functionality like offline access, a hook to the file system, notifications, native windows, etc. But we also tried to make the end user experience better. These are small applications so the install experience is much better. Every app also has the same install experience so you don’t have to deal with a lot of different custom windows or extra hoops. A couple clicks and you’re done. We also understand the appeal of being able to provide and use the most up-to-date version of an application. On the web there are no updates – just page refreshes. With AIR we have APIs that make it easy to provide updates to users and the install experience is very lightweight so the bad updating experiences will be few and far between.

But ultimately I think everyone is moving to make desktop development fun and easy. Prism makes it REALLY easy, just click a button in Firefox and you’ve got some desktop access. Even Microsoft has tried to make desktop development easier (and also look better). So I think everyone has a different approach. I like Adobe’s, but in the end it’s working with the flaws of the desktop and trying to hide those from end users and developers alike. That’s going to help reinvigorate the desktop and hopefully we’ll see a great blend of web and desktop together where we use the best stage for the job.

[tags]AIR, Adobe[/tags]