Alternatives to AIR?

No, no, no, this isn’t going to be an article about some crazy new breathing apparatus. Rather, it regards some new technology related to the web-desktop interface that I discussed briefly in my article yesterday. I stumbled upon this new program known as Adobe AIR. Today, however, while perusing the Gentoo mailing lists, I found that there is a program called Mozilla Prism. This seems to be along the same lines as AIR, but is produced by the Mozilla foundation. While reading the write-up on Prism, I also found that Micro$oft has also released a similar interface called Microsoft Silverlight.

With the links provided, you are all free to read up on each of these new interfaces. I’m still having trouble realising why such interfaces are even necessary. However, I’m the type of computer user that enjoys having separate applications for tasks, and this type of integration seems excessive to me. Let me say that, having not experimented with any of these three programs, that my opinions are, at current, unsubstantiated. However, the interfaces do seem like they could potentially provide numerous local and remote security exploits. I’m hoping that I will get the time to try out at least Adobe AIR and Mozilla Prism sometime within the next couple weeks. I don’t really have any desire to try Silverlight, as it is manufactured by the empire.

|:| Zach |:|

I’m gasping for AIR

Recently, Adobe Systems released a new, and very innovative piece of free software called AIR. As far as I can tell, this program seems to be a synthesis of the concepts driving Java and already-existing web technologies like Flash and Shockwave. As I just found out about AIR, I haven’t really had enough time to give a test-drive on my Windows machine. The interesting thing, in my opinion, will be to see if it is truly cross-platform. The AIR FAQ indicates that version 1.0 doesn’t support Linux, but that subsequent versions may. I found this lack of support to be perplexing given the superficial similarities between the AIR concept and Java, the latter of which is cross-platform and does support Linux.

Again, I have not had enough time to really investigate AIR, but it does seem quite interesting to offer a runtime environment which utilises already-existing web-based technologies. Some sites (like AOL, eBay, and Nickelodeon) have already come up with AIR desktop programs. To see more about these implementations, visit the respective Adobe case study pages:

AOL
eBay
Nickelodeon

For a basic overview of the new runtime environment, Adobe AIR, see the AIR: Get Started page.

|:| Zach |:|

Talking photo booth

I received this funny video via email today, and thought I would share it with all of you. Just think about this one before the next time you decide to go into a photo booth at an amusement park. How would you react?

Talking Photo Booth:

If you want to watch it multiple times, you will need to download the FLV Player by clicking the link on the right-hand panel. Once you have that player downloaded and installed, you can save a copy of this video to your computer by right-clicking the link below and hitting “save as.” I hope to upload an MPEG copy of the video in the near future. 🙂

Right-click to save a copy

|:| Zach |:|