Adobe's new client run-time AIR just came out for it's 1.0 release. Basically you can develop desktop apps with AJAX/HTML or their Flex MXML/Actionscript/Flash (which was bad ass by itself anyway).

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

2/26/2008 4:52:51 PM

Thats tight. You developed anything in it yet? easy to do? whats the performance of the client like?

2/27/2008 10:32:03 AM

i installed Air, then eBay Desktop on my Mac this morning
http://desktop.ebay.com/
it is very nice, both Air and Desktop.

Air downloaded and installed surprisingly quickly - i was expecting some gigantic framework like java or .net, but it wasn't. only a couple MB and the install took seconds.

Then i downloaded eBay Desktop and again it was a very small installer package, and it installed very quickly. After installation, it looked like any other Mac application package.
The first time I opened Desktop, it crashed on launch, but I opened it several more times and ran it with no problem. The performance was just as snappy as most of the other Mac applications I have. (running on a MacBook Pro core 2 duo 2.2GHz) At least the UI was - the online components had to load, but it was still faster than the ebay website.

edit:
i just read the ebay desktop case study
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/articles/ebay_desktop.html
this part is very true

Quote :

" Lesson 5: Users don't care about Adobe AIR And that's a good thing! Adobe AIR does a great job of getting out of the way. It has an excellent installation experience—applications can bundle the runtime with the application, and installation can be triggered from a Flash movie in the browser, which has worked very well with the eBay Desktop application. Adobe AIR provides a very useful application update framework. And Adobe AIR applications behave like any other desktop application. These little details really matter, and I'm glad that Adobe has paid attention to them in Adobe AIR. One measure of the success of Adobe AIR will be if users don't even realize it is there. "

[Edited on February 27, 2008 at 10:45 AM. Reason : .]

2/27/2008 10:42:13 AM

I've developed some things in Flex and have been a pretty big Flex advocate for about a year. I spent the better part of the year in meetings and cussing people out over the state of our code base. I'm still in the process of getting our code in line so we can replace the GUI portion of our application to Flex. I've done two working demos in it. It's pretty neat stuff and beats the absolute hell out of doing HTML/CSS.

It was funny I saw the advantage of all this last year. Adobe rocks.

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[Edited on February 27, 2008 at 5:14 PM. Reason : a]

2/27/2008 5:10:55 PM

I've installed a few apps in windows (ebay and goog analytics - http://www.aboutnico.be/index.php/downloads/) and I am pretty impressed. I had some problems installing AIR packages, but after installing air framework manually and rebooting worked fine. Hopefully they can keep the AIR runtime small.

The lacking linux port is really a showstopper for me. 50% of the appeal is the platform independence, and they only support microsuck and 2 mac os's. If this is supposed to be a forward looking technology linux should have been as important as mac os IMO. I know they say they have beta coming but if it is anything like their flash for linux plugins, it will be super low on the priority chain.

^I've never used flex. Is it more for coders, or more for actionscript type people?

2/27/2008 5:35:00 PM

ActionScript type people are coders.

2/27/2008 6:12:22 PM

i noticed this a few days ago but honestly couldn't think of anything i'd use it for

2/27/2008 7:33:19 PM

unless you're a developer, you don't "use" it for anything, except to run programs that are written for it. In the coming months, developers and website owners will start creating desktop versions of their webapps, for example, a Facebook application. Then if you wanted, you could download the facebook application instead of going to facebook.com. The facebook application would run in its own window instead of in a browser, and would have native menus and controls and stuff, instead of in-browser controls. You could also use it, at least to some extent, offline.

2/27/2008 8:02:16 PM

Definitely have a few ideas for this ... Too bad I dont plan to learn actionscript/coldfusion/flash

I downloaded the Google Analytics App, and I REALLY like it alot better than the web version.

Finally, no more browser spam to go with useful applications.

2/27/2008 8:09:40 PM

just installed Google Analytics too, and wow - its great. Very, very nice compared to the webpage (even thought the site isn't that shabby since the makeover last year). It just feels really good to have this as a standalone app instead of working inside the browser

The installation process for the Air apps is great, at least on my Mac. Even better than installing Native Mac applications. The install button in the browser launches the Flash downloader+installer immediately. No futzing with disk images and application bundles or anything.

2/27/2008 10:37:49 PM

You don't use Flash to develop in it, you use Flex/ActionScript. ActionScript is pretty easy to pick up if you know Java fairly well. The Flex Builder IDE is really easy to use. You can really do a lot with under 50 lines of code. Check out some of the sample app's source code.

For example to do a Tab Browser (like the wolf webs links alone the top).

You'd do:

<mx:TabNavigator>
<mx:Canvas label="Photo Gallery"></mx:Canvas>
<mx:Canvas label="Message Board"></mx:Canvas>
</mx:TabNavigator>

Then you could put the actual page in as the canvas. To do a wipe effect where the screen moves up and down when you click on the new links is 1 line of code in addition to what I just showed.

http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/explorer/explorer.html

2/28/2008 8:14:25 AM

^helpful link thanks. I used to know flash/actionscript really well, but not flex. I was confused on how flex fit into the picture, but am not any longer.

How does FLEX (and now AIR) handle different languages? I see AIR only supports US english, does flex have a similiar limitatioN?

2/28/2008 3:15:39 PM

i've been doing WPF development at my latest job. don't remember seeing a WPF/Silverlight thread (and search is broken) so I'll just hijack this thread for both frameworks

4/8/2008 4:53:43 PM

^^^not saying that isn't cool but you can do all that with scriptaculous (javascript) too. (the whole blind down effect among several other effects in the library).

4/8/2008 5:08:20 PM

^

Javascript doesn't have an IDE with debugging and easy deployment/compilation. I just pounded out a Flex app in a day that goes into system test tomorrow. It works for sure on every platform the same way, so it's less to worry about. It's also object oriented and a lot easier to develop with.

How is WPF? I don't do any Microsoft stuff any more (well not since 2001) and haven't seen it.

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[Edited on April 8, 2008 at 11:20 PM. Reason : a]

4/8/2008 11:17:21 PM

don't discount the power and importance of javascript

so far my experience with WPF has been 50/50. it can definitely do some cool things, and for sure helps designers bridge the programming gap, but "debugging" XAML is retarded, and every control has weird things that don't work right (i'm using infragistics controls and it's a nightmare)

4/8/2008 11:26:29 PM