A new version of Adobe AIR–version 1.5–was released in mid-November in conjunction with the 2008 Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco (it was originally released for Windows and Mac OS X, a Linux version came out a few weeks later). I’ll talk about the features of this new version in a separate post but I wanted to quickly mention what your AIR application’s end user will see when the framework is updated.
For example, I wrote an AIR application (using HTML and JavaScript) for in-house maintenance of the company’s DMCInsights.com Web page. It allows me to easily post updates, view errata by book, and submit new errata for each book. This is all stuff I used to do by going through a secure area, accessing phpMyAdmin, going through the INSERT form, etc. It was a tedious process that could have been addressed by creating admin pages in PHP, but I never got around to it, plus those pages would need to be secured. Anyway, I was very happy with the application I made–these kinds of utilities for managing dynamic Web site content are a great use of AIR technology–and have been using it regularly.
The first time I opened this application after the new version of AIR came out (and, to clarify, I’m just running this application like any other desktop application that you would provide to a client), I saw this message:
If the user clicks on Update Now, the new version of the AIR framework is downloaded and installed. Existing AIR applications will continue to work (these releases are backwards-compatible) and new applications will be able to take advantage of the added features in the latest version of the framework. As I’ve repeatedly said, I’m a big fan of the AIR technology, and this is another good example of how the user experience is simple and streamlined.
