J. Jeffrey Hanson

The Windows desktop is as some say, “the ocean in which we swim.” The Mac desktop is small, but very elegant. The Linux desktop is a whole new thrill for those of us who don’t mind tweaking a few lower-level configurations. Where is the common ground among these strikingly different beasts? Adobe AIR.

Adobe AIR makes good on the write-once-run-anywhere promise that Java once had for the desktop and it does it very powerfully. The Adobe AIR runtime installs and executes apps written in ActionScript and MXML. This automatically opened it up to a vast base of Flash developers. The secret sauce for Adobe AIR is the sophistication that it offers to desktop apps executing in a virtual machine. Some might argue that AIR applications offer more to the desktop than the native languages of the OS. If you have not experienced the ease in which Adobe AIR permits you to write very powerful apps for all major desktops, I encourage you to do so.