Following the announcement of the new Adobe Air interface to Google Analytics yesterday, I decided to have a good look at Air for the first time and see what it could really do. My expectations were fairly high based on what I'd heard from Adobe but I was bitterly disappointed with the applications that are currently available.
Air applications are like widgets that are easily authored (apparently) using existing technologies such as HTML, Flash and Javascript. Using Adobe's development tools, you can build your own Air applications to do whatever you want (within reason).
Given the great potential of the Air framework, it is disappointing to see Adobe's sample applications and showcase including feeble applications such as an RSS feed of colours from their Kuler application, an application that lets you draw with a virtual marker pen on your screen and a web developer tool that displays the source and DOM of a web page with significantly fewer features than the excellent web developer extension for Firefox.
I honestly couldn't find a single Air application, whether developed by Adobe or by 3rd parties, that I found in any way useful. There didn't seem to be anything available that couldn't already be done a better way. For example, why would you want to run a seperate Google Anayltics Air application which provides you with the exact same features as the browser-based version. Or why would you fire up the Kuler RSS colour feed when you could just view it in your RSS reader?
Maybe as the framework matures and more developers come up with new ways of using the technology, something genuinely useful will emerge, or maybe I'm just missing the point, but for the moment:
Adobe Air = I don't get it.
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