Adobe Air 1.0
I’m sure this is not the first place for you to hear this but Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is now shipping!
I love AIR. Recently I’ve been working with building a CMS tool for a site we’re working on at AKQA. Compared to a traditional CMS that would be online (built in flex or traditional web technologies such as html & javascript) the big thing here is that i was very easily able to add the functionality of saving changes to files. With it the the administrator can administer the site when being offline and then just upload the changes when an internet connection is available. The administrator can also save multiple versions of the content which is very handy especially in this particular application (which i unfortunately can’t say more about).
It’s cool with AIR to be able to build your own desktop apps that just are useful (instead of having a grand commercial purpose); I know I regularly find features I’d like to see in existing apps. Knowing Actionscript 3 and reading a little documentation is all that is needed to build and app that does a better job yourself 😉
I see myself doing a lot more AIR stuff in the near future. The performance is still far away from a regular desktop app built on system level languages but instead we get the simplicity of Actionscript to do powerful stuff. With Actionscript also of course working online we can build online and offline applications that save the same codebase. Sweet stuff!