On Monday, Adobe officially released version 1.0 of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), the company's cross-platform software technology for running rich internet applications.
AIR, which has been available as beta software since the beginning of last year, is a mechanism which lets developers build Flash-based applications that can run on the desktop. Like regular desktop apps, AIR applications are downloaded and installed on your hard drive (almost always for free). You have the ability to drag and drop files into and out of AIR apps, and they work even when your computer isn't connected to the internet. However, unlike traditional desktop applications, AIR apps are powered by web technologies, so they can handle rich media like video and audio. They also feature more "web-like" user interfaces with customized scroll bars, buttons and controls.
For examples of some AIR applications, see Wired.com's reviews of the Buzzword word processor, eBay Desktop and Tweetr, a Twitter client. There are over 200 AIR applications available for download -- see a couple dozen stand-out apps featured at adobe.com.
"This is a big release for Adobe," the company's chief technology officer Kevin Lynch told Wired.com in a telephone interview. "Now, we're enabling people to create these applications using open web technologies and bring them to the desktop."
AIR applications also have the advantage of being able to run on either Mac or Windows machines. A Linux version is "shaping up quickly," according to Lynch, who says we can expect it later this year.
The company will be holding an event in San Francisco on Monday morning to announce the release and to show off new applications demonstrating AIR's potential. The New York Times Company is already generating buzz around its ShifD news reader, an AIR-powered app making its debut at the event.
Monday's release is an important milestone for Adobe. With AIR, the company is directly competing against other offerings for building and running web applications on the desktop using open-source tools, namely Microsoft's Silverlight, and to a lesser extent, Google Gears and Mozilla's Prism. The recent growth of productivity apps that run in the browser, like those from Google and Yahoo, demonstrate that people are growing more comfortable with the idea of working in a connected environment, collaborating online and storing personal data on remote servers. Rich internet apps, which bring those abilities to the desktop while retaining richer, "web-like" user interfaces, are the logical next step.
Although AIR is largely piggybacking on the success of Flash, programmers can write AIR applications using plain old HTML and JavaScript via Adobe's Flex framework. Version 3 of Adobe Flex was also released Monday morning, and it has been available under an open-source license since April of last year. Using Flex, programmers can build Flash-like user interfaces using Ajax and the open-source SQLite database instead of Flash.
Also being released on Monday is Adobe's Blaze DS, an open-source database application that enables more efficient connections between server-side databases and the Flash player -- and, by extension, AIR applications.
To help speed adoption of AIR apps, Adobe makes the installation process seamless for the user. Once you download an AIR app, the installer will "sniff" your computer to see if you have the runtime installed. If you don't, AIR is installed automatically. It's a one-click process.
We'll have coverage of Monday's AIR launch event as well as a Q&A with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch later today on Compiler.
