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Making good on its promises to increase support for the free Linux operating system, Adobe has posted a pre-release version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software for Linux on its website.
AIR has already reached 1.0 final release status on Mac OS X and Windows. At a press event in February, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch gave a preview of the Linux version of AIR, promising it would be released very soon. Now that it's arrived, Adobe has high hopes for AIR's success on the
Linux platform. Namely, Adobe is expecting to see AIR fuel a new growth
spurt in the Linux application ecosystem.
AIR is a platform which enables programmers to build web applications that also run on the desktop. AIR apps do everything web apps do – they seamlessly connect to web services, the navigation feels like a web browser, animation can be powered by either Flash or JavaScript. But AIR apps also gain desktop-only abilities like drag and drop, and direct read-write access to the computer's file system – not to mention the fact that they're accessible even when your computer isn't connected to the internet, as rare as that case is these days. As a result, AIR apps feel more complete and usable than strictly browser-based applications.
These apps also retain one important characteristic of their browser-based counterparts – cross platform support. This is the bit that's expected to give a boost to Linux. Here's what Lynch told Wired.com when AIR 1.0 was released for Mac and Windows:
"AIR could open up a very fertile ground for applications to come to
Linux and deliver great user experiences on Linux – even without
people intentionally making them for Linux. So that is potentially a
very disruptive thing. We'll see what happens."
Lynch is confident here, and he should be because he's right – this does have the potential to change the Linux atmosphere for the better. Also, the most innovative ideas in application design and user experience aren't happening on Linux. They are happening on Mac OS X, Windows and on the web. Linux, long suffering from the "designed by geeks for geeks" syndrome, has largely been left with unintuitive, difficult to use applications that are at best carbon-copies of their Mac or Windows counterparts. Sure, there are some good-looking applications with innovative interfaces on Linux – various Superkaramba widgets come to mind – but they are few in numbers when compared to those in the worlds of the web and commercial OSes.
AIR for Linux is available as an "alpha quality" release on labs.adobe.com. There are still a few kinks to be worked out, like printing support and support for coding in DRM technologies – something unwanted by most programmers you know, but a requirement for many of the media companies wanting to build specialized media players for music and video.
Adobe has also released an updated version of Adobe Flex Builder for Linux. This release (alpha 3) provides support for Adobe's Flex building tools for developers using the open source Eclipse platform.
To help fuel the development of AIR on Linux and to build support for its technologies on Linux in general, Adobe has joined the non-profit Linux Foundation. The San Francisco organization provides legal and financial support to key Linux developers and fosters communication between the various companies building apps for the free operating system.
For examples of some AIR applications, see Wired.com's reviews of the Buzzword word processor, eBay Desktop and Tweetr, a Twitter client. There are over 200 AIR applications available for download – see a couple dozen stand-out apps featured at adobe.com.
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