

Adobe AIR soars to loftier heights - ccraigIW
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/11/50TC-adobe-air_1.html

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proee
My wish for Adobe AIR (as posted in another article on HN) is to have the
availability to distribute AIR apps with the runtime via your own custom
installer. If you have a general purpose application (for non-hipsters) it's
going to be a painful process having them jump through all the hoops of
installing the runtime. Not to mention they probably will get the "Adobe
Updater" at no extra charge!

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huhtenberg
> ..and _even_ salting passwords with randomization modifications to help
> protect against dictionary-style attacks

Wow. That's like almost a computer rocket science. I simply stopped reading
their review at this point, because if they are excited by salted passwords, I
don't really care about what else they have to say. _Especially_ if the final
rating is 9.3 out of 10.

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swilliams
Question: are there any real world AIR applications out there other than
Twitter clients?

~~~
decode
Balsamiq Mockups has been getting a lot of good press lately:
<http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups>

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SingAlong
oh! I didn't know that Balsamiq was built on AIR. And only now did I know that
a lot of people are still clueless abt AIR like me.

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windsurfer
I don't really understand AIR. Isn't it just an animation engine that's had a
programming language bootstrapped to it, and then flung onto the desktop?
Seems a little too hacked together for me.

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jamongkad
From what I heard it's kinda like running Flash apps on your desktop.

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iron_ball
It is exactly that, though AIR also provides desktop-level capabilities like
local file and device access.

AIR is another attempt at the age-old "write once, run anywhere" concept. One
reason I left HTML/Javascript web design and got into Flash was that I wanted
the incredible luxury of writing for a single platform with a single set of
implementation quirks; AIR is an attempt to extend that luxury to the desktop.

It's got quite a few steps left to take; the runtime install is seamless and
only happens once, but the app install screens are needlessly scary, as we've
discussed before. Still, for many situations AIR is not an unreasonable
choice.

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ram1024
add me a nice "port to iPhone/Android" button and i'm sold.

seriously i would pay hard cash for it

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swombat
Hey, wasn't some Titanium thing supposed to be killing AIR?

Oh well, I guess it's yet another killer rumour that's been just a little
exaggerated....

