Adobe AIR

The world of the internet has come so far as to give us the power to learn everything in record time. Almost everything on earth could be learned from what was written by individual contributors online. There are also online games that you can install because of the client that you can actually run.

What we used to enjoy at the comforts of our room, we are not enjoying games at the comforts of our home WITH millions of people worldwide. However, the internet has only come as far as to what it can do when they are online. For example, ebay.com is only as good as getting things online.

However, when we go offline, sometimes we tend to forget the great things that we have visited. If we didn’t bid on those things, we can just forget about it. There are also websites that we only visit for one time and then we tend to forget about it.  Yes, we can always check what in the history box but then, it’s still time consuming. Plus everything has to run through your favorite browser. Think what you can do if you don’t have a browser in the first place?

Breaking the barriers of a browser is quite a challenge since it will require a client or software that could be pre-installed, which means megabytes after megabytes of memory has to be eaten every time we need to run in our computer. Adobe hopes to break the barrier of browser based web surfing by developing AIR.

AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime – a powerful tool that lets you create desktop softwares small enough not to be intrusive but big enough for you to run a website even without the use of a browser. It was used to be called Apollo but for some reason it was changed to remind us of its functionality.

This is also cross platform as it uses standard Adobe’s Flash combined with Ajax. What will basically happen is, instead of going to the website using your browser; you have your desktop tool to check that for you. The menus and other links will now be provided directly in your desktop. No need to go through the browser to check your bookmarks. This is great in document terms. However, there are problems that each developer will have to face upon implementation of the project.

For one, security is a great concern in most of the developers. Flash and Ajax combined could be a security nightmare for most of the companies who wanted to implement AIR into their customers desktop. Another problem each developer will have to face is the ability to let it run faster in your desktop.

Even though it will be supported by your hardware, using Flash will still be a challenge. All in all, AIR is great technology that will be implemented someday. Its promise may not be agreeable to some for now, but its ability but from the fact that it’s a small desktop application, a little indulgence in our favorite but not intrusive websites and online applications will make AIR very appealing to consumers.