AIR definitely fills a niche. If I’m not mistaken many of the most popular twitter apps are written in AIR.

At work we use it for production utilities. Very fast to create QA checkers, image editors, configurators, without firing up java. The drag and drop feature is highly useful here.

For clients in some cases we use flash in a way that offline and online have the same code and UI but when running in AIR have additional functionality. Not having the application dependent on the browser is great for anything with real time updates, music, chat, stock, VOIP calls. One of our prospective clients are in the military on ships with spotty internet access, having the ability to know when things are online or offline and cache large amounts of data locally are both highly advantagous.

I agree that AS3 and beyond, with the security restrictions won’t be necessary a Java/.NET killer, but trying to compare them misses I think one of the primary advantages Adobe is trying to push, web skills as desktop ones.

Also AIR is becoming a halfway to mobile device development, where Java has not been super successful, and .NET is never likely to get there. The reason for this is that AIR is about tight integration with the platform rather than decoupled when running in the browser. In any creative mini-app, be it weather, chat, remote controls, it’s usually design centric and Flash is a far more conducive backend/target than Java or .NET for integrating with the rest of the production workflow.

The second reason why those aren’t even necessary is the trend towards users going to highly optimized workflows, needing a narrow purpose tool rather than a powerhouse like Photoshop. 20% of the features that do 80% of the work, instead of the 20% that that take up 80% of the complexity.

As we are seeing with PixelBender and Alchemy (flash playing quake), photoshop online. Flash’s capabilities are also getting less constrained. It’s anybodies guess as to where the cap of it all will be.

Thanks for a great blog (and clean design!)

TroyWorks.

eBay Desktop Turns 1,000,000
http://desktop.ebay.com/blog/?p=18

Noel, I wish I could discuss your points at greater depth but I’m a bit pushed for time. Thanks for replying to my own points.

I will reply to this…

> To sum up, I don’t think AIR in its current state will be a
> mass market success.

I’m not certain it was ever meant to be a mass market success, in the sense that Flash is a mass market success.

It’s not as if in releasing AIR, Adobe had released Flash, or Silverlight, or JavaFX. AIR fits into an existing ecosystem. It’s a part of something else. A cog in a machine, even if it is a pretty big cog.

Anyhow, thanks.

Joolz

Below you will find a few clarifications and counterpoints to the AIR benefits you raised:

* AIR apps can work when offline
I don’t buy into the argument that plane/train travelers, poorly connected home users, and rural travelers are a huge untapped market waiting for web applications that will function offline. My guess is that they represent a huge untapped market waiting for improved connectivity. I’d be surprised to see any breakaway successes in the “sometimes connected” area.

* AIR offers greater access to the file system/improved local storage
I believe the trend is for user data to move from the local file system to the web, not the other way around. Services like Flickr and Google Docs are examples of this. I would guess that cellphones and Eye-Fi type devices will help accelerate this trend. Furthermore, since the time when this post was written, Adobe has announced improved local file system access for version 10 of the Flash Plugin, eroding this as a benefit specific to AIR.

* AIR complements other technologies, it doesn’t compete with them
While the development ecosystem can certainly support a wide variety of development models, I don’t think that means they aren’t in competition with each other. Despite this, I partly agree with you on this point. I think AIR is a pretty good technology for building tools and utilities to supplement web based properties (image uploaders/notification tools/etc.). As you pointed out, it allows companies to leverage existing developers and codebases to target areas where web based applications fall short.

To sum up, I don’t think AIR in its current state will be a mass market success. I think it could certainly find a small niche to be successful in, but nothing on the scale of the hype and press AIR has been accorded. I do agree that at some point the desktop and the web will blend together, but I think that day is a long way off and it remains to be seen if AIR or AIR-like platforms are the future of that integrated desktop.

I have friends who live inside the ebay desktop app. I am not an ebay user, but they tell me that the ebay AIR app does have additional functionality.

> Local file system access is nice, but it is limited and not nearly as flexible as storing data in the cloud. The
> “sometimes connected” capability of AIR apps is a pointless feature in a world where we expect to always be
> connected.

No, we don’t “expect to always be connected”. I’m sure we would all like to be, but we don’t expect it.

I don’t know where you live, but millions of people the world over spend hours every day commuting to work on trains, both on overground and underground trains. If you go to London, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of people working on laptops in cafes and bars where they have no internet connection, either because they can’t afford the high cafe rates, or because there isn’t a connection available. Millions of people fly around the world where they aren’t always able to connect to the internet.

There are hundreds of countries in the world where the internet is either extremely slow, or only sporadically available. Many remoter parts of the United States are still without broadband and people rely on dial-up lines to connect to the internet. Given a choice between spending hours updating their ebay accounts off-line and updating them painfully online, guess what they’re going to do!

> Instead, I believe AIR is actually competing against web based applications, including
> those built for the Flash Player.

No, it isn’t competing against those things. Not even slightly. It is *complementing* them. It isn’t a competition.

> More importantly, I believed AIR flowed in the wrong direction. For the past 10 years (and
> especially in the past 2) desktop applications have been slowly getting replaced by web/browser
> based ones, and I fully expect this trend to continue.

Absolutely right, but you don’t seem to have noticed the web migrating to the desktop. This is something that AIR is but a part of. How about Google Gears and any number of other technologies that have brought the web to the desktop? Not only is AIR not flowing in the wrong direction, but it was an extremely smart and well implemented move by Adobe.

Both the web and the desktop are cross migrating and it is extremely likely that users in the near future will not distinguish between the two. There will be no ‘this’ and ‘that’. It will conceptually become one.

I am a photojournalist. I upload a lot of images to the web. I could do that with a browser, but that would mean having either to upload thousands of 120mb+ images, or pre-sizing them first by hand. I use an AIR app. The AIR app reads the online project structure and the required image sizes from the website. I drag my images onto the project, AIR resizes them automatically and uploads the images in the right size.

Having a web based technology that allows me to drag and drop onto it from the desktop; that allows full access to the power of my computer and the local file system; that I can use offline when I’m five hours from the nearest hotel in Northern Uganda and have it synchronise with my news organization while I’m having a shower… is invaluable. Beyond valuable.

It’s not all about cool apps for you to drool over. There will be thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people and businesses making use of this technology and building apps that you will never see, just as there are hundreds of thousands of individuals and businesses making use of invaluable internal java applications that you never get to see.

Lastly, there are many aspects to this that you haven’t considered at all. Several extremely important commercial factors. Here’s just one of them, because I’ve now run out of time to continue writing.

1) In the case of the AIR application that I (and others) use and rely on, it was written by our own people – the ones we already know and trust – using their existing skills. They didn’t need to retrain. Nobody had to hire in expensive contractors. They found it easy to do and we got what we wanted, quickly. And it works.

I used AIR to build a file download manager that would have taken me a lot longer using java or similar. Cross-platform out of the box, encrypted local data, byte-level control over network traffic. These are great features. Also it’s nice for an AS developer to easily deploy to the desktop.

Also I agree about the AIR install being smooth. It’s handled really well.

Because they have created an API onto Analytics (which Google have accepted and will make available soon) the reporting is can be much more extensive.

Yes you have to download a new version of the app, but Firefox seems to do that every time I open my browser these days and as you say the install process is seamless. The update process is even better.

What AIR has going for it is the speed at which you can develop apps using your existing HTML/JS skills.

@Daniel Wabyick – I appreciate the hard work that’s been done on AIR and I look forward to seeing what becomes of it in the future, but right now I’m just not convinced. I don’t think locally stored data is the future of computing, and I don’t think the “native”-ness of AIR apps is enough of a feature on it’s own to make the whole experience worthwhile. AIR needs to be able to do something that’s clearly superior to doing things in the “regular” web app way, and do so using capabilities that could not have been incorporated into the Flash Player itself.

Overall, I think your point that AIR is an alternative platform for web apps is very astute. AIR is not as powerful as native desktop apps.

That said, AIR does have powerful features not found in traditional web apps.

First and foremost, it allows both Flash and Ajax developers to create web apps that ‘break out of the browser’ and provide apps that interact with users in ways that browser apps simply cannot:

Custom windows, dock and tray icons allow the creation of streamlined notification based apps, while File IO and NativeDrag capabilities make it easier to interact with local content and get it on the web.

Finally, the ability to store data locally (File and SQL based) allows the ability to create apps that operate on relatively large sets of local data extremely quickly. Not only does this allow for offline/online apps, but it also can create apps that are much more responsive, and usable, than their web counterparts. Check out the ‘Employee Directory’ sample app on Adobe for an example of this.

That all said, I do hope we see a higher caliber of applications out there. I think we will once AIR gets out of ‘developer prototype’ stage and gets some attention from application designers. Also, more features will help, and they’re definitely coming.