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Has anyone tried any development for the AIR platform? It looks like the SDK is free. I wonder what the catch is? Perhaps no IDE and just command-line tools?
It appears to be a platform for making desktop and mobile device applications based on Flash and ActionScript and/or HTML and JavaScript.
Adobe AIR Developer Center
Adobe AIR Forum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime
Hmm, I guess the snag is expensive high-level tools like IDEs.
However there is the open source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashDevelop
I've messed around with it a bit, might try to build something complete with it eventually. It doesn't seem very popular, which means it's harder to find useful examples and explanations to get things working - that's been my problem with it. How would I do XYZ? ... No one seems to know.
I already have Flash, but I've heard good things about Flash Develop as an alternative.
I get the impression it's intended more for multimedia applications than general purpose development.
I get the impression it's intended for web developers who would like to create something encapsulated for the desktop. If you're a desktop developer, you probably already have more robust options than AIR. But for the web dev who'd like to apply their skills in a desktop environment, AIR might be appealing.
That's probably why you see more "multimedia applications" - they're common as web apps.
I use a couple AIR apps... it strikes me as Adobe's "answer" for WPF and XAML... but that's just my impression.
-tg