Adobe Air - deserving of the hype? [closed]

Question

There is a lot of interest and hype on Adobe Air lately. Is it deserving of this and are there any worthy competitors to Adobe in this space? The only Adobe Air application I have used is TweetDeck .. while I am not loving it, that may be a more a UI design/usability issue.

Answer 1

One code base, many platforms.

Flex/Air is delivering on what Java promised to be 10-15 years ago..

With Java many companies made their own Java Runtime and things became incompatible from platform to platform. Microsoft has replied with their WPF/Silverlight, it is capable, but in a lot of ways it doesn't have the 10+ years of rich media history that Flash does.

What is remarkable about Air / Flex is that it truly provides the same experience on multiple platforms in a way very little has. The penetration of the Flash Player is as ubiquitous as the web browser. No need to install a 40 mb .net runtime, or a java download, or approve this or that. It just works. The recent open sourcing of flex/flash standards has been inviting as well.

I think Air could prove to be a breakthrough technology. Adobe can quietly and capably provide a complete desktop experience (ala www.buzzword.com) in the browser without the AJAX battle that google docs had to go through.