Marin’s blog

Adobe AIR is really cool Some initial thoughts on Adobe AIR and let’s see who won the prize?

These days I’m looking into Adobe AIR( ex. Apollo) and I’m really happy with this technology.  Actually it seems to be an ancestor of the old idea of Macromedia to develop a standalone Flash applications. Altough at the time I was looking into it it was really immature and Macromdia (honestly) even doing a great product like Flash were pretty messed up in terms of features and programming environment.

It seems that Adobe implemented a different approach and Flash 9 and AS 3 are really cool products. I’m looking into the features of Adobe AIR and it seems to provide features what a programmer will really need. Very very nice I must say. However I’m gonna be writing more about AIR in the future, but the subject of this article are the prizes ;)

To popularize the still in beta technology AIR Adobe organized “Adobe AIR Developer Derby” Now I’m looking in the results and something makes laugh really hard:

Do you remember the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” ads of Apple ?  Now let’s see some of the awarded applications in Adobe’s derby and then try to convince me Apple’s ads are not true :

Grand prize winner and an overall winner :  A project tracking - agenda planning tool (http://www.agileagenda.com/) - first thing I see about this app is the sad bars representing as dollars the time I spent in the office, then I see the Windows XP style window and then I see the link saying “Pre-order now and save” … The next prize for Best HTML Business App goes to “ORA Time and Expense” http://www.johnwu.com/ora (no comment) - A Windows window frame as well …

Let’s look at another winner -  The Wild Card Winne : Adobe’s comment on this app “The wild card category really was wild. […] In the end, one application that stood above the rest was a really polished 5-track audio mixer called Digimix.” First thing I see about this app is the stylish interface and (hehe) the graphic representation of audio… then it’s free and then when I watch the video of how it works .. hehe guess whether this was developed on a Mac (tip: this is a rhetorical question)

Ok, I’m not an Apple evangelist, but … there’s something about the Mac

And the Adobe Air - but more on it - soon.

Marin