Mike Chambers announced at the onAIR tour London event last week that he would be releasing an electronic version of the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers pocket book, by the publishers O’Reilly, under Creative Commons licence terms. Well, good to his word, you can download the pocket reference from the Adobe onAIR website.

This book is the official guide to Adobe AIR, written by members of the AIR team. With Adobe AIR, web developers can use technologies like HTML and JavaScript to build and deploy web applications to the desktop. Packed with examples, this book explains how AIR works and features recipes for performing common runtime tasks. Part of the Adobe Developer Library, this concise pocket guide explains:

• What Adobe AIR is, and the problems this runtime aims to solve
• How to set up your development environment
• The HTML and JavaScript environments within AIR
• How to create your first AIR application using HTML and JavaScript
• Ways to perform an array of common tasks with this runtime

Also included is a guide to AIR packages, classes, and command line tools. Once you understand the basics of building HTML- and JavaScript-based AIR applications, this book makes an ideal reference for tackling specific problems. It offers a quick introduction to a significant new development technology, which lets you combine the reach and ease of the Web with the power of the desktop.

The ActionScript reference for rich Internet application development provides an alphabetical reference for all native ActionScript APIs for the Adobe technology platform runtimes: Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR—as well as the Adobe Flex framework APIs. Use this guide both as an API reference and a tool to learn about the ActionScript APIs available within the runtimes.

Download the ActionScript reference for RIA development (PDF 1.3MB)

The Adobe technology platform contains two primary runtimes. Flash Player is browser-based, and Adobe AIR is desktop-based. Because Adobe AIR is built on top of Flash Player, the Flash Player APIs are available within Adobe AIR. Consequently, Adobe AIR APIs are not available within Flash Player. The Flex framework is built on top of the Flash Player APIs, so it runs in both Flash Player and Adobe AIR. However, a number of Flex APIs take advantage of AIR APIs, and thus work only within Adobe AIR.

More information about this guide can be found on the Adobe Developer Centre Website.

Since the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) was released at the end of February, we now have a stable platform on which to build desktop applications with our existing web skills. A number of people have already started and the Adobe AIR Marketplace is filling with AIR applications by the day.

So what is the big deal? The Adobe marketing team state that:

The Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

What AIR applications should you check out?

What is intriguing is that all the tools I have chosen are generally useful tools for the developer or designer, with the exception of twhirl, which is a social-interaction tool. I’m looking forward to when other, less developer-centric tools become freely available. AgileAgenda has taken the lead with this respect, albeit not freely available, as has eBay desktop, but I would like to see examples from the BBC in the form of a desktop BBC iPlayer or maybe a Flickr image browser, del.icio.us bookmark reader, RSS aggregator and a Picnik image editor.

Analytics Reporting Suite

The Analytics Reporting Suite, by Nicolas Lierman, brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all the features of Analytics.

For website owners this is a must-have application. Like the twhirl AIR application below, it is a fantastic example of what can be achieved with Flex and AIR. Measuring visitor trends and traffic are essential tasks to managing and improving a websites performance. The Analytics Reporting Suite allows you to configure multiple Google’s Analytics accounts and access the web-based suite’s plethora of features via a desktop application. The application displays integrated graphs and animations via a tabbed interface, which allows you switch between a number of reports. These reports can then be saved as a PDF, Excel or XMLdocument, or printed.

You can download and install the application from the About Nico website.

twhirl twitter Client

twhirl, by Marco Kaiser, is probably the most popular desktop client for the twitter micro-blogging service. Most of the features available on the twitter website are accessible through twhirl, plus, a lot of usability enhancements have been added to make it easier to manage multiple accounts. This is great for those who want to separate business and personal accounts they may have.

The twhirl application is a great example of how AIR can bring web applications to the desktop; it can dock to the system tray, display message alerts and you can configure the applications opacity when not focused (great if you like Mac and Vista-styled themes). The application allows you to search twitter users, view their timelines, add friends, view followers, delete tweets and much much more. Twhirl automatically fetches your friends’ status updates, direct messages and replies, whilst also colour coding different types of messages and alerting you to messages both audibly and visually.

The twhirl application is skinnable and comes with several built in skins with which you can customise the application. All-in-all twhirl is not only one of the best twitter clients, but AIR applications.

You can download and install the application from the twhirl website.

Kuler Desktop

Adobe kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe Creative Suite software. Built using Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about colour: colour for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing. Kuler is clearly targeted at the designer, but anyone interested in colour will benefit from its use.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe Labs website.

WebKut

WebKut is a web screenshot tool that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you with 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection. This little application proves particularly handy for those presentations or projects that need great visuals from the web.

You can download and install the application from the WebKut website.

RichFLV

RichFLV, by Benjamin Dobler, lets you edit FLV files. The key features include reading FLV metadata, read and edit cuepoints, cut FLV files, convert the sound from an FLV to MP3 format, convert an FLV to an SWF … and much more.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe AIR Marketplace website.

SearchCoders Dashboard

This Flex-based chat widget is designed with programmers in mind. The code input feature allows developers to chat about code without disrupting the conversation.

You can download and install the application from the SearchCoders website.

Pownce

Much like twhirl in look, feel and ease-of-use, but with a slant towards productivity rather than micro-blogging, Pownce is a way to keep in touch and share things with your friends or colleagues. You can send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients. This is a great collaboration tool and was one of the first services to really embrace AIR as an application architecture, which could realise their service as a desktop client. Everything that is available via the Pownce website is also available via the client application, except and possibly importantly, the ability for the user to amend their account settings and add friends to your network; this still has to be done via the website.

For a small annual amount, Pownce offers a paid-for service which will eliminate adverts from your profile and allow you to send huge file sizes (100MB) and customise the theme of your Pownce.

Pownce also offers Drupal integration and a mobile application, which works with the iPhone, BlackBerries and many more ‘internet-ready’ mobile devices.

You can download and install the application from the Pownce website.

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of AJAX. It also competes with Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.

Microsoft describes its advantages as follows:

Compelling Cross-Platform User Experiences

• Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.
• Seamless, fast installation for users, thanks to a small, on-demand, easy-to-install plug-in that is under 2 megabytes (MB) in size and works with all leading browsers.
• Consistent experiences between Windows-based and Macintosh computers without any additional installation requirements.
• Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance.
• Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.
• Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight.

Flexible Programming Model with Collaboration Tools

• Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight enables developers and designers to easily use existing skills and tools to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
• Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace” required.
• Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.
• Choice of development languages including JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and more.
• Role-specific tools for both designers and developers that take advantage of Web standards and the breadth of the Microsoft .NET–connected software features.
• For designers: Microsoft Expression Studio for creating interactive user interfaces and media rich experiences, preparing media for encoding and distribution, and creating World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards-compliant sites using modern XHTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, and ASP.NET.
• For developers: Microsoft Visual Studio for developing client and server code with full Microsoft IntelliSense, powerful cross-platform debugging, rich language support, and more.
• Consistent presentation model by using XAML, the declarative presentation language used in Windows Vista–based applications. Controls, visual designs, media, and other elements can be presented with full design fidelity in both Silverlight and Windows–based applications.
• Extensible control model makes it easy to add rich content and behaviors while enabling efficient code-reuse and sharing.
• Dramatically improved performance for AJAX–enabled Web sites with the power, performance, and flexibility of Silverlight and .NET-connected software.

High Quality, Low Cost Media

• Unified media format that scales from high definition (HD) to mobile with Windows Media Video (WMV), the Microsoft implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) VC-1 video standard, as well as support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 audio.
• Add vector-based graphics and overlays to media with support for integration of graphics that scale to any size and broadcast-style overlays for tickers and closed captioning.
• Flexible ad-insertion solutions with video and animation, including the ability to deliver fluid, broadcast-style video or animated advertisements without loss of visual fidelity or motion quality.
• Lower-cost media streaming with Emmy Award–winning Windows Media technologies that can lower the cost of streaming delivery by up to 46%, and enjoy the flexibility to work with your existing Windows Media streaming deployments. Even further cost reductions are possible with the upcoming Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Pack for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.
• Broad ecosystem of media tools, servers, and solutions compatible with the Windows Media operating system.
• Microsoft PlayReady content-access technology that delivers a single solution for digital rights management support on both Windows-based and Macintosh computers for content providers (coming in Silverlight 1.1)
• Powerful encoding tools for live and on-demand publishing of media experiences with Microsoft Expression Encoder, including hardware-accelerated encoding of WMV and VC-1 at up to 15 times the performance of software alone when paired with a Tarari Encoder Accelerator board.

Connected to Data, Servers, and Services

• Mash-up and incorporate services and data from the Web by taking advantage of the Silverlight support for LINQ while accessing that data with common protocols like JSON, RSS, POX, and REST.
• Increase discoverability of rich interactive application (RIA) content that can be indexed and searched due to the text-based XAML format that describes interface and content in a Silverlight-based application.
• Rapidly scale applications with Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live to host and integrate software services and media content.

Streaming audio and video

• Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live offers a free streaming and application hosting solution for delivering high-quality, cross-platform, cross-browser, media-enabled rich interactive applications (RIAs). With the ability to author content in Microsoft Expression Encoder and other third-party editing environments, Web designers maintain complete control of the user experience.

Both Web 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) almost always depend up on the browser as a common denominator. It is with the web browser that web-based applications are accessed and run, yet the browser model is rapidly reaching its limitations.

Adobe thinks it has the answer and so now does Mozilla.

A year ago, most web developers had to think about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and perhaps WAP for mobile devices and widget development for one of yet more platforms. Today the horizon is changing and web developers are afforded more opportunity and possibly with that more complexity, through offline development.

Browser extensions now exist that allow for the creation of offline web applications with Dojo Offline, Google Gears, Firefox 3, and other options on the market, pioneering the way and making it possible to take your web application with you on an aeroplane or an underground train.

The drive to make these offline applications desktop applications has also been thrown into the mix, with examples coming from Apple with WebKit Cocoa bindings, Adobe with AIR and Microsoft with Silverlight. Now it is the turn of Mozilla to enter the foray with a project called Prism.

Prism is part of an experiment by Mozilla designed to “bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop applications“. Essentially, Prism will allow you to create a desktop-like application out of individual websites. These site-specific applications are a growing trend and a trend heavily marketed by, not only Adobe, but now Mozilla, as ‘the future’.

While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using Web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of Web browsers.

In its current form, Prism doesn’t have the ability to function as a desktop application without access to the Internet, but Mozilla says it is “working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.”

Instead of needing to run a browser to, for example, access Google Calendar, a simple icon can be clicked on the desktop. The icon will launch the Google Calendar application inside a Prism window, without any of the additional web browser bloat. This can have its benefits, especially when designing workflows and securing applications as the developer’s pain, the back button and address bar, are removed from the equation.

Although Mozilla may be excited about the concepts behind Prism, and Adobe about AIR not everyone shares the same enthusiasm, or has the working habits that require such an application-based approach. For some, the advantage of web applications is that they inherently aren’t desktop applications and everything can be handled in a single application almost anywhere on the planet, assuming a computer with a browser and web connection. However, Prism, AIR and Silverlight could end up offering the best of both worlds.

The excitment is brewing! From the Adobe MAX Europe 2007 website itself: Join us for MAX 2007 Europe, a unique opportunity to connect with the Adobe community for an educational and inspirational experience that can’t be found anywhere else.

We’re bringing together the most creative and influential minds in the community, from designers and developers to executives and partners, that will shape the future of our industry.

Adobe MAX is the one conference of the year where you can meet and interact with the teams who build Adobe platform technologies, such as Flex, Flash and Adobe AIR, that you use and develop with every day. There is simply no better opportunity to gain a deep understanding of these technologies. (Mike Chambers - Senior Product Manager)

For those of you who use Yahoo!’s Upcoming.org, there is now an event entry:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/235624/

See you there!

With the buzz around Rich Internet Applications (RIA) gaining a serious amount of steam and indeed press, with the likes of Adobe’s Flash/Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight, Sun have now got in on the act with JavaFX. Announced at this years JavaOne conference, JavaFX makes use of a new scripting language and the Swing API for user interface (UI) design to position itself firmly in the RIA camp.

With 5 million Java developers, Sun is not starting from scratch in building a JavaFX following, and Sun plans to release the source code for JavaFX Script to the open source community. The company also hopes that the 2 billion phones that run the Java Mobile Edition (Java ME) will be an advantage. For desktop applications, however, this might mean large, frequent downloads, which in comparrison to Flash, have not been seamless in the past.

James Gosling, the father of Java and a Sun Fellow, described JavaFX as “oriented around interfaces that are highly animated.” JavaFX can also eliminate some of the security and compatibility issues related to AJAX-based applications, which incidentally do not have good support on mobile devices due to JavaScript restrictions.

Java failed to pioneer rich web applications years ago with the applet, so whether the JavaFX announcement firmly reinvigorates Java as a platform of choice for RIA remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the RIA scene is becoming increasingly heterogeneous with four leading technologies striving for market dominance; AJAX, Java, Flash and .NET. Each technology has their own, often jingoistic, developer base so the dominance of one technology is not likely to take hold, at least in the short term. Indeed it is likely that the companies will employ a mixture of technologies to best fit the application being developed and the skillset available.

Microsoft finally unveiled its new product, Silverlight. But is it actually a product? Not really. It is more aptly described as a runtime system for a cut-down version of the .NET Framework and just-in-time (JIT) compilers. The runtime is tiny, designed to be a plugin to a web browser much like Flash is also available as a plugin. Microsoft see this technology as a potential “Flash killer”, although it is unlikely to achieve such a status, at least in the short to medium term. They have stiff competition from Adobe with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination which is engrained into the designer/developer community.

From the Silverlight website, it is clear that the project is heavily graphics-orientated and can do interesting things with video streams. Somewhat more interesting is that Microsoft have said that it will be consistent across multiple platforms, running on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. It may even progress to Linux through the partnership with Novell, not to mention support for Windows smartphones and other Windows embedded devices. This is intriguing, yet promising for a company that historically has shunned competing technologies.

Microsoft described Silverlight as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web”. The emphasis is on rich interactive applications delivered over the web. The result being applications which offer a new level of user interactivity to rival that of the desktop and firmly banish HTML-based website to the bin. Sounds familiar? Flash?

So how is it different from AIR/Flash/Flex? Essentially, you can use any of the languages supported under the .NET framework, which means that Silverlight applications can be written in C# or Visual Basic, as well as other languages such as Ruby and Python. Like the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight has its own set of development and debug tools in Visual Studio and a complete Expression suite for visual designers.

The Killer Application?

Silverlight on its own will not be the killer application so-to-speak. It is the services behind Silverlight, the data streaming services, that will be a key differentiator. Combining Silverlight with Microsoft’s new initiative, quietly referred to as “Live 2.0″, will provide video storage and streaming capabilities worthy of a Google-styled offering. These streaming services will clearly carry some form of advertising. You don’t have to use the Microsoft service, but the intention is clear; high-bandwidth, high-availability streaming of video data requires huge investment and Microsoft is making that investment to take its own slice of a huge, fledgling market.

Video streaming isn’t the only part of the service. Microsoft plans to develop facilities such as server-side data and credit card processing. This opens up possibilites for an application developed in Silverlight to be hosted, managed and distributed by Microsoft or another partner. I hear alarm bells … hosted, managed and distributed all by Microsoft! This is clearly putting all your eggs in one basket, but prudence is key when choosing which services to sign up to.

The Future Is Online.

With Silverlight, Microsoft has shifted its emphasis and signalled a firm intention that the future is online. It will be offering end-to-end solutions that allow the design and development of systems, and the management and distribution of those systems based around web services running not only locally but out in the etha of the Internet. Utimately we will be able to choose when, where and how we access applications and information. Whether Microsoft’s vision can be successful is dependent on whether this behemoth of a company can metamorphose from a conservative institution into a dynamic one. They have the money, the intellect and the technology, they now need the spirit of a precocious of a teenager.