One of the coolest demos from 360|Flex was watching Jordan Snyder hook up Merapi and Adobe AIR and use an AIR application to control a remote controlled car. It did a great job of showing off the cool stuff you can do if you let AIR connect to devices and native code. Unfortunately we don’t have that functionality in the runtime. But the Merapi Project creates a bridge between AIR and Java so you can do some very cool stuff.

Andrew Powell just blogged about another cool Merapi example that lets him connect directly to a GPS device and grab the data then plot it on a map. I’d love to be able to do that natively with AIR, so he got my imagination running wild. Very cool stuff, Andrew.