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Filed under Thoughts on February 29, 2008 by Richard Ziade

10 Reasons We Love Adobe AIR

adobe-air-10-logo A ways back, we rambled off 10 reasons we love Flex. With the release of Adobe's AIR desktop runtime platform, we're giddy all over again. At Arc90, we're getting tired of having our creations relegated to living inside the web browser's walls. We're eyeing the miles of untrodden territory: your desktop. And AIR is a great way to leverage what we already know to build some exciting tools for our products and clients.

So without further adieu, 10 reason's we're loving AIR:

  1. One Build, Many Platforms. We've always eyed turning our tools and apps into desktop clients, but the prospect of dealing with multiple operating systems turned us off. With AIR, you build once and deploy to OSX, the various Windows flavors...and even Linux!
  2. Turn Any Web Application Into A Desktop App In Minutes. While you're hardly taking advantage of all the goodies AIR has to offer, you can take just about any web destination and turn it into its own desktop app with AIR in around five minutes. Don't have five minutes? Try our Airifier.
  3. Real File Interaction. There are few things more annoying than browsing, finding and uploading files via a web form. With AIR, you've got full control over dragging and dropping files between your desktop and Internet-based applications.
  4. A Seamless Installation Experience. AIR apps beautifully install with a couple of clicks - even if you don't have AIR installed. No more "where did I drop setup.exe?" experiences.
  5. No More One-Size-Fits-All! Did you ever navigate to a full-blown portal page to just find out tomorrow's weather? Some content and applications don't need a full-blown browser to run. With AIR, we can create finely tailored experiences that fit the needs neatly - and you can custom brand them too.
  6. A Desktop App That Hardly Needs To Ship. One of the big benefits of web applications is that updates can occur without the pain of deploying an app to hundreds of desktops. AIR marries the seamless deploy-ability of web applications with the power of desktop apps.
  7. Airplane Friendly Web Apps! With SQLite, we can finally build apps that anticipate and accommodate offline usage.
  8. AIR Hearts Ajax. With a full browser built right in, we're able to leverage not only our Flash & Flex skills, but Ajax and Javascript skills as well. It's a great way to quickly transition existing rich web apps to the desktop.
  9. Minimize To Tray Or Dock. This is a subtle but important feature. Certain web applications are all about the updates. AIR allows you to hint to the user that important events are happening in a subtle and unobtrusive way - without opening your browser and visiting a web destination.
  10. "Hello Clipboard! Nice To Meet You" We've sort of accepted that just about all we can paste into a web browser is text into a form control. With AIR, you can handle multiple data formats - text, URL, images, etc.

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