Thanks for your insightful

tim.negris — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:51:38 -0400

Thanks for your insightful remarks. It is interesting that you mention media players, because Adobe is about to introduce one, and it is an AIR application. You can get the beta at labs.adobe.com. I checked it out a little and it looks kind of like MS Media Center, scaled and instrumented for what many are now calling the 10-foot user experience (living room TV/PC hybrid experience). I would have gone further with it, but had a funny problem. On the Labs page where you download the AMP beta it said that I had to install AIR first, and provided a link. That link redirected me to where you download the release version of AIR on adobe.com. I did that and then installed AMP and got a run-time error when I tried to run it because of the AIR version. I uninstalled the release version of AIR, went back to the Labs site where they still have their own links for the AIR Beta and got that. I uninstalled AIR 1.0, installed AIR Beta 3 and AMP started up fine. I looked at it a little, but - here is the punchline - my exploration was interupted by the AIR auto-updater which I (foolishly) allowed to do its thing, which was to replace Beta 3 with R1.0.

When it was done, AMP wouldn't run, but this time there was no error. It just wouldn't run. I need to look into it further. The one time I was able to run it, I was surprised to find there was already a fair amount of content available, especially for a beta. I tried to play a few videos but had a lot of buffering halts. Normally I have a pretty fast connection, but maybe it was off that day. It took a while to load a video but also stopped and started many times for buffering while it played. The machine I tried it on is the smallest one in the house - single core with XP Home and it could very well be that the AIR/AMP design points starts with dual core, but then what about phones? I plan to go back through it all on a dual core Vista machine and see what's what.

Comments from anyone exploring the AMP/AIR software would be most appreciated.

Interesting to read that you

rainwebs — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:59:17 -0400

Interesting to read that you compare AIR/Flex with the revolution we had when the Macintosh delivered what the PARC guys developed before. Thinking about the dimension in shifting client-side presentation and development for it, you may be right.

For me as a former GUI developer from the mid 90ties, using Delphi 3.0 those days, Adobe seems to be the first in a decade (and maybe only) one delivering such a client developer experience. You may remember how fast Visual Basic and Delphi were to present a database table in a GUI. Click - click - click - ready, in less than 5 minutes. Compare this to markup-based presentations these days :-(.

For those experienced with JavaScript/Ecmascript and XML, and of course with a GUI development background, Flex/AIR is easy. Although, my experience shows that there are some tweaks you've to fight with when adapting the user model behind all the libraries you get. I developed a video player with flex e.g. and expected that a panel is a canvas I can put things on. In Delphi this is something neutral you can change in width/height, etc. In Flex a panel has a header and footer, both used by default. So, a zero/zero position is different from what Delphi expects here. I trapped into this twice. So, it is near the GUI development experience from the past ;-).

For me Adobe offers near 10 years of ahead development and quality. So, no question who will win the race. Sun gave up the desktop when they skipped to improve Applets in the Web browser. Java WebStart is no real choice. AIR has a better user experience in this field anyway. And all the multimedia support is better for years.

YouTube shows how strong the Flash codecs are today. Microsoft tries to reach this for years, even Quicktime doesn't deliver the same user experience. RealMedia? Well, I can't remember to have used such videos on Web sites for maybe three years.

For me Adobe will be a strong player in the future. They have PDF, they have Flash. Two of the most important standards in Web and maybe soon in business-oriented use of the Web. Ah, and of course the tool set.

So, why thinking about Microsoft, Sun, and all the other "we-are-a-bit-late-but-we-are-better-than-the-market-leader" sayers?

RIA Zone - Comments for "Why AIR Is Not Google Gears, Prism, JavaFX or Silverlight &amp; Why It May Be Bad News for Microsoft and Apple"

Thanks for your insightful

Interesting to read that you

RIA Zone - Comments for "Why AIR Is Not Google Gears, Prism, JavaFX or Silverlight & Why It May Be Bad News for Microsoft and Apple"