Adobe AIR Experiences?

[dilettante]

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

[dilettante]

Hmm, I guess the snag is expensive high-level tools like IDEs.

However there is the open source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashDevelop

[SambaNeko]

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.

[dilettante]

I get the impression it's intended more for multimedia applications than general purpose development.

[SambaNeko]

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.

[techgnome]

I use a couple AIR apps... it strikes me as Adobe's "answer" for WPF and XAML... but that's just my impression.

-tg