Thought Delimited

It took me a bit longer than I expected, but I released an AIR 1.0-compatible version of my colorPicker AIR application this afternoon.

The problems I ran into were mostly my own fault. I originally developed colorPicker under AIR Beta 2. When AIR Beta 3 came out, I downloaded and installed Beta 3, reinstalled colorPicker, and it worked fine, so I assumed that the changes in Beta 3 were to aspects of AIR that my app didn't use. I didn't realize that they had changed the syntax of the AIR descriptor file, so I was surprised when colorPicker wouldn't even compile under AIR 1.0.

Once I updated my descriptor file, I was able to compile and run colorPicker, but oddly enough I had to tweak some CSS styles regarding padding, so that took a little more time.

But anyway, it's done. According to the stats on RIAForge, it's been downloaded about 160 times, so hopefully that means some folks are getting some use out of it.

A number of AIR applications were showcased at the Adobe Engage 2008 event yesterday. I found a blog that has summaries and pictures of some of the presentations given:

http://galbraiths.org/blog/category/engage08/

Some of the featured apps I'd heard of before (like the eBay AIR application), but some were new to me.

Check out the pages on the Adobe site:

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

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

...I'm a little disappointed that AIR still isn't quite ready for Linux, because it's not truly cross-platform until it is, but I know they're beta-testing it with Linux users so hopefully it won't be much longer.

AIR made the Technology Review's top-10 list of emerging technologies:

TR10: Offline Web Applications

Nice to see AIR get some recognition as an emerging trend. Now give us AIR 1.0 already! :)

I was reading Dan Wilson's report of the Flex 3/AIR Tour event down in North Carolina yesterday on his RIA Zone blog (one of the new DZone sites I mentioned in my previous blog entry), and he mentioned that Ben Forta demonstrated an AIR application made by Allurent that impressed everyone there. He included a link to a video demo of the product:

http://www.allurent.com/page.php?id=70

I'm equally impressed. The application uses AIR in ways I hadn't considered, like allowing color matching of products based on the color in an image on the user's hard drive, and pushing news and content down to the application on a scheduled basis rather than waiting for the user to pull data down. Definitely worth checking out.