Adobe Air!

[Hitboxx]

Bonjour,

Anybody tried this yet?

According to Adobe, The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

I just tried Adobe's put-the-web-on-your-desktop thing called AIR and it's pretty neat. It is similar to those widgets, gadgets,..etc but on a grandeur scale. Though still in the infancy as far as application availability is concerned, nonetheless it is a neat platform and it works.

I downloaded it from the site, installed it on my Linux, browsed (from Firefox) through the application listings at their site, and saved the ones I wanted to my /home. Then used the Adobe Application Installer which was earlier installed from the main app and pointed it to the directory containing the Air apps. A few clicks and tada! all apps installed with desktop shortcuts to launch them.

I tried out two apps, one a video catalogue kinda thing and another a Dutch music TV.

Both worked fine and I was already enjoying the content on my desktop. I'm impressed.

[gforce23]

Been using AIR-based Twitter clients (TweetDeck and Thwirl) for more than 6 months now. AIR apps are very slick, I tell ya.

[krinish]

Air and Flex go hand in hand. Flex provides IDE to build and deploy air applications.
You can have a AIR application in minutes using flex. You can use HTML, javascripting and ajax to build stand alone programs.