Adobe is on the AIR

I went to Philadelphia last night for the "On Air Bus Tour" help by Adobe. It was really a great time. I got to meet the usual suspects such as Ben Forta, Mike Chambers, Kevin Hoyt, and Ryan Stewart.

All in all the event was pretty spectacular, given some of the cool demo's around AIR. One particular highlight was when Ben Forta developed an album collection browsing application with out writing any code what-so-ever and then though Coldfusion, turning it into a desktop application. Pretty tight. Kevin Hoyt did some nifty code work showing as he put it, "The lines blur between ActionScript 3 and JavaScript," as AIR allows them to easily talk with each other and interact through HTML, CSS, etc...

I must say that one of the things which I took away is that despite have all this cool new technology that not only pushes the envelope but actually creates new ones, your paradigm does not have to change that much. Yes your skill set will expand, but you will get to live among metaphors that you are already comfortable with. If you are a Flash developer, Coldfusion, Flex, HTML or event text editor type developer, you can easily develop for AIR. The implications are truly staggering.

I have to thank not only the guys above, but Adobe as well for sponsoring such a terrific event (for free no less) in a really nice venue (the food was pretty good too).

// Jaye Morris