Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

Plenty of people at JPMH have been excited about Adobe’s new AIR platform. AIR is something that you install on your desktop that allows you to run standalone applications that can be built using standard Flash ActionScript (the scripting language used to Flash apps), this is what’s known as a runtime environment and is exactly how Java works. It’s a bit like running web sites but on your desktop. There’s a couple of quite interesting possibilities with AIR. From a brand’s perspective, if you can make a download-able application that is useful, compelling or exciting enough for people to install then you have the equivalent of a door-to-door salesman’s dream of being invited into a consumer’s home for a nice chat on the sofa with a cuppa tea and a nice slice of cake. ActionScript is a relatively easy language to master when compared with languages such Java and C++; languages normally associated with desktop applications. This is mostly because you don’t have to worry about such tedious little things as memory management, that’s all taken care of for you. ActionScript then becomes much more interesting when you can actually save things to the user’s hard drive and have a database that  can live on the computer’s hard drive.

AIR has been in development for a while but it has only recently become stable enough to become exciting. Northcode has been doing something similar for years and has lots more functionality, however, Adobe are offering an imposing and compelling alternative by making it open-source, essentially allowing other developers to add to and refine the AIR runtime environment itself. This is partially because AIR itself uses a number of open-source technologes such as WebKit and SQLLite.

Here’s an interesting interview on Wired from Adobe’s tech premier Kevin Lynch