Adobe On AIR Minneapolis bus tour

Adobe came to Minneapolis for their Summer 2007 On AIR bus tour, where they introduced the new AIR runtime environment built to deploy internet applications to the desktop. The Minneapolis stop was held at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown, on the University of Minnesota campus. Matt Thommes was able to attend the Chicago stop held just 2 days later, which was the final city of 20 that Adobe visited on the tour.

The conference was well-organized, very entertaining, and generally lots of fun. Free food (unique and expensive options as well) and beer all night sweetened the deal (actually Red Bull and Pop Rocks really sweetened the deal). Promotional t-shirts, books, and coupons were given to all attendees, and very nice prizes were awarded to a lucky few.

AIR provides a cross-platform (Windows, OS X and Linux on the way) runtime environment for developers that want a richer application is free from the constraints of the browser. With AIR developers can access the local file system for faster data manipulation, or build friendlier drag-and-drop user interfaces (like pasting things from the clipboard, detecting file types, launching certain applications and more).

Adobe designed AIR so that developers can write JavaScript and to call AIR APIs for operating system access, or (more typically) from Flex/Flash ActionScript code. Adobe has positioned AIR to be usable for those doing plain JavaScript/HTML development, not just Adobe technologies like Flash and Flex, though some of the fancier applications that were demonstrated were built in Flash/Flex.

AIR also allows developers to easily package up their application and provide a “badge” installation on a website. If the AIR runtime is not found on the operating system, it can be downloaded for the user without requiring the user to do additional work. This should alleviate some of the pain I’ve dealt with searching for a .NET when a Windows application needs it, but doesn’t provide a convenient way to get it.

AIR also seems to start up very fast, unlike a Java JRE that might be running an applet or Swing code, and take 30 seconds or more to start-up. AIR can also can auto-update itself so that developers can take advantage of the latest AIR features without worrying that users will have older versions of AIR.

Adobe demonstrated IDE integration with Aptana, Eclipse, FlexBuilder and others, but said development with AIR is not constrained to Adobe IDEs. However a nice IDE feature available in Dreamweaver was the ability to see code changes without having to rebuild the entire application, a major advantage of an agile web development framework like Ruby on Rails. One of the Adobe presenters mentioned Pownce as an example AIR application, which was fun to hear since I’d first learned about AIR when I covered Pownce previously.

AIR is still a beta technology set to release in early 2008. Don’t miss the AIR developer FAQ for answers to interesting questions, or the gallery where several useful and attractive applications are displayed.