

Ask HN: Adobe AIR - LolWolf

What's the opinion on Adobe AIR? The popularity among Hackers?
It seems good to develop front-ends and nicely portable applications, but, I am a C++/Java programmer, it's a first for AIR, so: if you do use it, what for? Is it <i>the</i> basis/platform for one of your applications, or is it a front-end?<p>Just wondering, and thanks.
======
hoodoof
Air and Flex are dead technologies.
[http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/11/adobe-donates-
flex-t...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/11/adobe-donates-flex-to-
foundation-in-community-friendly-exit-strategy/)

~~~
doctorwho
AIR and Flex are two very different beasts.

~~~
hoodoof
Not really. Air is Flex packaged up to run as a standalone desktop app.

~~~
Lionga
Really. Air is AS3 (which can be Flex or not) packaged to run as (standalone)
desktop app, android and ios.

Also Flex is now open source and continues to be one of the best cross
plattform dev frameworks.

~~~
89a
> continues to be one of the best cross plattform dev frameworks

If you don't care about performance or quality of interface

------
amitabhsharma
I am Java/Python programmer, I used Adobe Air recently for pilot project at
work trying to find if we could use it in our applications.

I can sum up my experience as below while developing a task management app.

Good Stuff : Very easy to learn, develop, debug and package.

Missing Stuff: No threading support. No direct web-workers support.

It can be easily used for Small GUI apps. But for something more serious ,I
would rather give titanium desktop or Kivy a shot.

~~~
LolWolf
All right, awesome, thanks!

------
octaveguin
I've developed a mobile app with adobe AIR that's been downloaded over a
million times on android and iOS. The performance is pretty good (I'd say
better than the html5 frameworks I've seen) but the platform is targeted at
mostly games.

Companies don't like to brag about the use of AIR in their products because it
has a bad stigma to it (see HN) but it's actually still the most powerful
platform for building and distributing especially games across windows, iOS,
android, and mac. If you look at the alternative (html5) - it's the clear
winner IMO.

Definitely AIR is always used as a frontend. And it's a damn good one because
you can quickly create a beautiful UIs in Flash CS5 and then just wire them up
in AS3.

The thing that scares me the most about AIR as a platform is the negative
attitude towards it. I care about AIR because it's the right tool for most of
the things I want to do. The negative attitude is killing it when there is no
other viable replacement.

------
kaushalc
See my company Live Documents www.live-documents.com. Built in Flex. The
advantage it gives us is the same code base can be used for the web, desktop
and mobile platform (yes that includes ios).

~~~
LolWolf
I haven't quite checked out Flex, although I heard it's similar, but going
slightly down, now. Any other improvements for Desktop apps, et al?

------
bencevans
I don't actually develop AIR apps but I've only seen them noticeably in the
form of front-end because of the cross-compatibility with Operating Systems.
From this I've come to think of it as a more desktop (opposed to browser)
aware version of Flash.

~~~
LolWolf
Hmm, all right. Although I'm not a big fan of Flash, myself, I try to take
advantage of the HTML5 (what I can squeeze from my little knowledge of), apart
from TweetDeck, though, what are some good apps to check out made in AIR, that
you use?

~~~
yen223
Klok, one of the better time-management software for the Mac, runs on AIR.

~~~
Lionga
<http://www.balsamiq.com/> and many others too

------
factorialboy
Pretty much dead. Latest versions don't work on Linux. And its not really
popular on Windows or Mac OS either.

If you want to make desktop apps in HTML+CSS+JS, try building an embedded
WebKit app.

~~~
LolWolf
Yeah, I was looking for something along those lines (i.e. Brackets style, but
I have no idea what to do about the file access and C++/CUDA integration (as I
need to do some large parallel computing, the app is simply a front-end)).

