Ask HN: Adobe AIR

[LolWolf]

What's the opinion on Adobe AIR? The popularity among Hackers? It seems good to develop front-ends and nicely portable applications, but, I am a C++/Java programmer, it's a first for AIR, so: if you do use it, what for? Is it the basis/platform for one of your applications, or is it a front-end?

Just wondering, and thanks.

[hoodoof]

Air and Flex are dead technologies. http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/11/adobe-donates-flex-t...

[doctorwho]

AIR and Flex are two very different beasts.

[amitabhsharma]

I am Java/Python programmer, I used Adobe Air recently for pilot project at work trying to find if we could use it in our applications.

I can sum up my experience as below while developing a task management app.

Good Stuff : Very easy to learn, develop, debug and package.

Missing Stuff: No threading support. No direct web-workers support.

It can be easily used for Small GUI apps. But for something more serious ,I would rather give titanium desktop or Kivy a shot.

[LolWolf]

All right, awesome, thanks!

[octaveguin]

I've developed a mobile app with adobe AIR that's been downloaded over a million times on android and iOS. The performance is pretty good (I'd say better than the html5 frameworks I've seen) but the platform is targeted at mostly games.

Companies don't like to brag about the use of AIR in their products because it has a bad stigma to it (see HN) but it's actually still the most powerful platform for building and distributing especially games across windows, iOS, android, and mac. If you look at the alternative (html5) - it's the clear winner IMO.

Definitely AIR is always used as a frontend. And it's a damn good one because you can quickly create a beautiful UIs in Flash CS5 and then just wire them up in AS3.

The thing that scares me the most about AIR as a platform is the negative attitude towards it. I care about AIR because it's the right tool for most of the things I want to do. The negative attitude is killing it when there is no other viable replacement.

[kaushalc]

See my company Live Documents www.live-documents.com. Built in Flex. The advantage it gives us is the same code base can be used for the web, desktop and mobile platform (yes that includes ios).

[LolWolf]

I haven't quite checked out Flex, although I heard it's similar, but going slightly down, now. Any other improvements for Desktop apps, et al?

[bencevans]

I don't actually develop AIR apps but I've only seen them noticeably in the form of front-end because of the cross-compatibility with Operating Systems. From this I've come to think of it as a more desktop (opposed to browser) aware version of Flash.

[LolWolf]

Hmm, all right. Although I'm not a big fan of Flash, myself, I try to take advantage of the HTML5 (what I can squeeze from my little knowledge of), apart from TweetDeck, though, what are some good apps to check out made in AIR, that you use?

[factorialboy]

Pretty much dead. Latest versions don't work on Linux. And its not really popular on Windows or Mac OS either.

If you want to make desktop apps in HTML+CSS+JS, try building an embedded WebKit app.

[LolWolf]

Yeah, I was looking for something along those lines (i.e. Brackets style, but I have no idea what to do about the file access and C++/CUDA integration (as I need to do some large parallel computing, the app is simply a front-end)).