I’m at the Fox Theatre in my hometown of Atlanta today checking out the Adobe AIR Bus Tour Summer 07. It’s nice to be at the first event nationwide. I’m attending at the behest of a friend who thinks it going to be the "next big thing." I’m skeptical. I fear yet another proprietary attempt to empower developers to craft unique custom web interfaces to provide desktop functionality as a layer over web technologies, and that’s not a compliment. These types of things, especially when looking at the black box nature of opaque Flash SWF files, do their best to ignore those things that make the web work, i.e. stateless URL-addressed resources. The reality of Adobe AIR remains to be seen… P.S. It would have been nice if Adobe had consulted me to ensure that this event was more convenient for me. I mean, I actually had to leave my home and cross the street to attend. Adobe, Please! ‘-)
Hey Mike, thanks for posting your thoughts. One of the reasons we included full support for HTML was because we wanted web developers to be able to choose a standards-based solution. The Runtime itself is proprietary yes, but I think we’re trying very hard to work within the spirit of the web. Thanks again for coming by, hopefully you got some good info!
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com