Adobe onAIR Bus Tour
So I attended the Pittsburgh visit of the Adobe AIR (adobe integrated runtime) Bus Tour tonight (posted late, happened on Aug 17). I missed most of the opening keynote, walking in on the last 15 minutes. Right after, they moved into the first of several evening lectures. During the first two or three I felt exhilaration, getting ideas and inspiration to dive into a new web framework. How couldn’t I after being greeted with a goody bag containing a CD of Flex Builder 3 Beta 1 and other SDKs, two PDF O’Reilly AIR reference books and a load of examples, one print copy of the O’Reilly books “AIR for Javascript Developers Pocket Guide”, 40% off my next O’Reilly purchase, 3 FREE months of Media Temple hosting and up to $129 off the full event pricing for Adobe’s MAX conference in Chicago when they’re launching AIR 1.0?
I was meeting a friend at this event but he eventually didn’t make it, thanks to being stuck late at work (till 11pm!). As the night wore on and we came up on the first break I came to a harsh realization.. I was in over my head. I’ve been seriously struggling to learn ANY programming language and getting besieged with ActionScript and JavaScript jargon, I could feel the floor sinking like quicksand. I didn’t want to leave, hell, they were giving away a copy of CS3 Master Collection! How couldn’t I stay for that?
I didn’t win it.
Boo!
This AIR seminar got me pumped though so it’s tempting to jump ship again for Flex and AIR. Initially, I was bummed when I went home. Programming seemed so hard and they covered material so quickly that I felt lost after the first hour. Most of the attendees are already programmers, they already get it. Thinking about the whole talk the next day got me thinking about WHY I wanted to program at all. I really like desktop apps and really like the Mac way apps work but web developers are always in demand and I felt that would give me more job options. AIR bridges that gap between the desktop and the web. In fact, it bridges the Mac/Windows divide as well.
The lecture “Building your First AIR App with Flex” is really cool. It showcases the ease of building the app base in Flex, creating your UI and adding some functionality with Actionscript.
Later on Kevin Hoyt re-built all the apps with HTML and Javascript to show off the flexibility of AIR for both Flash/Flex and HTML/Javascript developers.
Go watch all the onAIR videos posted to date.
AIR actually works a lot like the guts of OSX which runs on Core Data, Core Image, Core Audio & Core Animation. Common frameworks that all apps can take advantage of thereby saving the programmer time and allowing he or she to focus on how to make the app BETTER instead of just making it at all. After 10+ years there doesn’t seem to be anything like that in any version of Windows. AIR fixes that enough that an indy developer could build true cross-platform apps that look and work great, finally bringing some of the Mac class over to Windows.