Adobe onAIR Tour
April 10th, 2008To the future of applications
So yesterday I attended the Adobe onAIR tour at The Brewery in London’s east-end. And what a pleasant surprise it was as well. After being a little disappointed with the Colin Moock session a few weeks ago I wasn’t sure what to expect but the AIR team definitely turned up to impress.
Daniel Dura and Kevin Hoyt both made really interesting presentations about the flexibility of the AIR development environment and underlying interface. Particularly ion regards to integrating HTML and Javascript.
Dion Alamer from Ajaxian.com made a a great talk about Google gears and the 3rd party technologies you’ll be able to utilize within AIR. Pointing out the fact that this technology embraces the existing, rather than developers having to recreate the wheel.
Lee Brimelow finished off the show with some great mini applications demoing some key features of the app and supplying us all with a much needed laugh at the end of a long day.
Looking at the technology it’s definetely got some serious legs. At the very least the opportunity for web developers to create native applications without having to worry about learning the formalities of standard application development is great. The main sell of AIR has to be around the integrated web/desktop features. At initial review, the ability to drag-and-drop web data from your browser is brilliant but the possibilities that this opens up is just unimaginable. In a digital world where Google is taking over with online applications and slowly trying to bring your desktop to the web. An application that brings the web into your desktop and vice-versa is not necessarily in competition, but quite simply the personification of Marshall McLuhans “Global Village”.
I for one can’t wait to get my teeth stuck into developing some AIR applications.