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!

> ..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.

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

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

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.

I really like the SlideRocket presentation viewer. SlideRocket is an online app that lets you create presentations which you can then sync with an AIR app to view them offline too.

My group is working on a Visualization tool for the study of global epidemic simulations using Air. I've been extremely surprised at how powerful it is.

AIR is popular in the digital signage industry

There's a google analytics port

My friend's 30+ person company is developing desktop software exclusively on AIR.

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.

I'd take a good look at it. You can also build HTML and Ajax apps for instance. I also think you have some preconceptions about the Flash platform that aren't particularly valid; it's quite a mature platform and certainly not hacked together. The fact that Flash has it's roots in animation has little to do with its current capabilities, either on the web or on the desktop.

Adobe AIR is a runtime. Great tool for those fluent in XHTML/CSS/Javascript/Actionscript to deliver apps for desktop.

If you are a web developer and want to leverage on your existing knowledge to target desktop market, AIR is the way to go.

You dont need Flash/Flex to build AIR apps. The Air SDK is available cost free at adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/ Or you can use aptana.com/air

A comparable open source tool: titaniumapp.com

AIR is a wrapper around HTML (or Flash) that add OS-level hooks. It's like a super-charged Javascript. For instance: want to write to the file system? In AIR, Javascript (or Flash) gets an easy way to do this.

BTW, for anyone hacking AIR on the HTML side, check out ExtJS. Best JS framework I've seen for developing apps that look "app-like".

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

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.

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

seriously i would pay hard cash for it

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....