For those of you who have had trouble in the past with using Flash / websites to make desktop-like applications, there is Adobe Air (formerly known as Apollo).
Basically Apollo is a desktop runtime (compatible with both Windows and Mac) which allows you to embed Flash and HTML/CSS/JS+AJAX inside a desktop runtime (similar to a Director Projector).
Why would you do this?
- You can have cool icons for your apps, and can put them on the dock
- It can access the file system!!!!!
- You can use it to make quick and easy applications
- It can access all other types of system level functionality
- It can interact with other programs (eg: take information out of a website)
An example is the Adobe Creative Suite 3 installer, which is actually made up totally of HTML/CSS/JS (pretty cool if you have seen it, simple and effective). Don't know if it uses AIR as such, but same concept.
So yeah, its pretty cool :). It also leverages Adobe's Flex platform (naturally). So yeah *HINT* maybe a nice feature of your social site might be a nice desktop interface that people can use if they choose (this is my personal random thought) /*HINT
Can find it at: Adobe's Air Site
cheers
3 comments:
I lovvvvvvee AIR/Apollo.
Brilliant little idea, and it's been excecuted so well ( Pownce is a nice example of a system that's on it's way to being rad ). I'm currently also using an RSS feed agregator that runs on AIR ( ahahahaha get it ? ).
Lol,
Yeah, maybe thats why Steam runs so badly :D.
I haven't really used Apollo too much (I did download it when it first came alpha but at that stage it was fully broken). Do you have to use Flex in your workflow? Or can you go straight from Flash CS3 into AIR? Know of any basic tutorials around if you have played with it?
Hahaha, funny - because 5 minutes ago I had steam freeze up on me. It's certinaly improved from its first release/iteration though.
From what I understand you can go straight from FlashCS3 -> AIR. I havn't had much of a chance to play with it myself though, downloaded the SDK, that's about it.
From what I've found ( I think I got this from the adobe wiki ) in order to develop in AIR, you can use One or a combinations:
-Flash / Flex / Actionscript
-HTML / Javascript / CSS / Ajax
-PDF leveraged with any application.
From what I've seen too Flash/Flex seem to be used separately, I don't know - I really should get around to playing with AIR, see what it's like. Could be very useful for social - type - stuff. Been focusing on my java though, bad Anthony.
As for AIR Tutorials ? I don't know if there are many of them around at the moment, looks more like you've got to reverse engineer the source code from the example applications. There's a blog at http://www.adobeairtutorials.com/ which seems to have a nice collection of links, that's the first place I'd start ( besides the adobe site of course ).
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