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The Best Things About AIR

1. Cross Platform

AIR lets developers write code once and offer their applications to both Windows and Mac users. If that was the only part of this announcement, it would be exciting.

2. It’s beautiful

AIR lets developers use Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and AJAX to create desktop apps. That means no more ugly desktop software! AIR apps combine the beauty of Flash with the responsiveness that AJAX brings to the web and that desktop software almost always offers.

In addition to the gorgeous Twitter clients built on AIR, there are more serious AIR apps that leverage the same beauty and usability for more serious applications. See, for example, the company Acesis, which offers an AIR for the capture of structured medical data.

3. It’s not in the browser

The browser is great but how often does yours get overloaded? To say that the web based future will be confined to the browser would be pure folly. I want web enabled apps that I can use outside of and during my otherwise frenetic bopping around web pages in my browser. The fact that some AIR apps are easy to set persistently above all other apps on your desktop makes it all the easier to use them throughout your workflow inside the browser and elsewhere.

4. Thermo

Adobe demonstrated an upcoming design framework called Thermo in October that can be used to create Flex apps for the web or desktop. Thermo lets developers easily integrate Photoshop items into the user interface of their apps. The company describes this feature as the option to “Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a ’skin.’”

This means big improvements in user experience and visual appeal of apps. Put those puppies in AIR and it’s going to be exciting.

5. It combines the responsiveness of the desktop with the cloud of the web.

It’s not about a Web Operating System or anything that will replace your local desktop, it’s about combining some of the best traits of the desktop with the cloud connectivity of the web in individual apps that live on your desktop.

The combined wisdom of the personal computer with the visions of the thin client or web-based world, is smarter than any picture of the future based solely on any of those paradigms seperately.

Now that AIR is in production, we’re going to see a whole bunch of dazzling and mainstream AIR apps made available. Here are some resources you can use to dig deeper and follow this trend as it develops.

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