Adobe onAIR Bus Tour Summer 2007

"Five cities in and thirteen to go..."

                                 - Mike Downey

So, Dallas is the fifth city on this tour and I'm happy to report that not only was it a really fun and informative event, but that Dallas had the second largest attendance so far! DFW Represent!

I'm not Flash or Flex developer (yet), so everything here was very informative for me. I've seen a couple of Flex/Flex Builder presentations via the awesome DFWCFUG, and this was just icing on top of that cake. I feel so stoked about all this. I feel like I'm getting in on what is basically the ground floor of what will become probably the defacto technology for developing connected desktop applications, and that's very exciting!

If you're not familiar with the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), it's really the next evolution in the Flash Player. It gives the developer access to the client's file system and a whole lot more.

Here are the APIs you can access with AIR:

• File System Access
• Network Detection (detect changes in the network state)
• Notifications
• Application Update
• Drag and Drop/Clipboard (the native OS clipboard)
• Local Database (SQL Lite)

Some of the things that you as a developer have with AIR are:

• Complete creative control over the application
• The ability to create cross-OS desktop applications built with web technologies
• A blend of the best of the web with the best of the desktop
• The ability to detect the client OS and behave accordingly

Stuff I learned

I had no idea how many different ways there were to develop applications that will run on AIR (heh... that sounds funny). You can write AIR apps using any combination of the following technologies:

• Flash
• Flex
• Action Script
• HTML
• JavaScript
• CSS
• Ajax

Of course, PDFs can be leveraged with any AIR application.

Flexbuilder 3 will have in-built support for writing AIR applications.

The ability to sign applications is coming in the next beta.

Kevin Hoyt gave two excellent presentations on writing apps for AIR using straight HTML and JavaScript! I had no idea that was possible! I know that if you know JavaScript that you can typically pick up ActionScript, but there are *some* differences, so I've been apprehensive about sitting down to write any thing with it. I can tell you now that my apprehensions have been quelled somewhat, and now it's just a matter of finding or making the time to start writing my first app.

Kevin also showed how you can dip into the Flash and ActionScript APIs from JavaScript and vise versa. Very, very cool.

Adobe has chosen WebKit as the in-built HTML engine. This is the very same engine that runs the Safari web browser and the browser on the iPhone. They chose this engine for the following reasons:

• OpenSource
• Proven Technology
• Minimum effect on AIR runtime
• Proven ability to run on mobile devices (iPhone, Nokia S60 series, etc.)

Yep. You read it right, eventually you'll be able to write applications for mobile devices! Adobe is hoping to have a version of Flash Player 9 for mobile devices by sometime in 2009.

Edit: Some folks have questioned this date, as it wasn't on the road map that we saw, but rather spoken by Mike Chambers. It may have been a slip of the tongue and I can't get anybody on the bus to either confirm or deny this information. So take it with a grain of salt. Sorry.

AIR also plays well with .NET and Mark Piller of The Midnight Coders talked about that. Not being a .NET guy, I have to admit that most of his talk went over my head so I sorta tuned out during that talk (Sorry Mark!). Maybe that will end up being to my detriment. However, one thing that I saw at the end of his presentation was a demo of a Skype Interface he's working on. He actually pulled it up, and called his cell phone with it! *That* was very cool!

Skinning and Visual Design

It seems that just about anything (and I do mean anything) is possible when it comes to look 'n feel. The sky is the limit in how you develop your UI, and how ultimately you can shape your user's experience with your application.

Lee Brimelow gave an excellent and sometimes hilarious talk about the possibilities in designing desktop applications. He had some very impressive demos showing the use of audio and video files and the drag and drop capabilities that AIR exposes. He wrote an mp3 player that allowed you to drag .mp3 files from the native OS desktop (file explorer, whatever) onto the AIR app. The application then recognized that the files being dropped onto it were .mp3s and it behaved accordingly. Really cool stuff.

Who's using AIR right now?

Pownce.com, a brand new social networking web site, has a desktop application that will hook you into the site and allow you to see updates from your friends. (btw, I still have 9 pownce invites left. Leave me a comment in the Pownce Invites post if you want one)

Finetune.com also has an AIR desktop application that allows you to create "radio stations". If you've not heard of finetune or its ilk (pandora.com), it's a free service that lets you select from music artists and it will broadcast (read: stream) music from those artists to your desktop.

Those are great examples of folks using AIR, but here's the one that really made my ears prick up: Ebay.

Yep. Ebay is developing a desktop interface to the most popular online auction site in existence. It's called Project San Dimas. Be sure to check out their FAQ.

I absolutely love that a huge company like Ebay is going to be using AIR. That's just another indicator to me that AIR is really going places.

What else? 

There was a bunch more, but I'm a horrible note taker and it's a minor miricle that I got as much down as I did.

I noticed a few people from the DFWCFUG in attendence. Clint Treadway, Tom Woestman, and Jimmy Harrell. There may have been more, but I'm still a relative new comer to the group so I may have missed others in attendance. I hope I spelled all your names right. Yell at me if I didn't and I'll correct it. :o)

Also, and this is probably just exciting for me (and maybe my company), but I did finally win a copy of Flex Builder 2 *with* Charting! That's like almost an $800 value! My thanks to Adobe and Mike Chambers. When I was called on, nerves got the better of me and I flubbed my answer, but it was close and I quickly corrected myself. So they gave it to me. YAY!

Well, I wanted to get all this written while the evenings events were fresh in my mind, but it's a quarter to three in the morning now and I'm going to end up paying for this in the morning.

Cheers!