Translating Geek Into English

As I’ve written before, I’m a fan of Adobe AIR, although it hasn’t yet caught on as much as I would have thought. You may also know that Adobe develops a ton of cool things in their Adobe Labs. Many things go from the Labs to a full-scale release, others never do. In any case, it’s often worth while scrolling through the Labs to see what Adobe’s up to lately (the same goes for Google labs).

I recently came across two interesting things at Adobe Labs:

• Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator, a technology preview program for experimenting with “bleeding-edge” capabilities of the Flash platform.
• Adobe AIR Launchpad, a desktop tool that helps to create Flex-based applications to be run through Adobe AIR. Run the tool, select a destination (desktop or mobile device), establish some base settings, select the features the application will want to use, and the Launchpad will generate a ready-to-compile AIR application with those features and settings. Or you can use the generated ZIP to open and edit the project in Flash Builder. It’s just a nice little automated tool to further expedite an already fast process.

I haven’t played with these others yet, but plan on doing so (they look useful):

• ActionScript Code Coverage Plug-in for Flash Builder
• Squiggly (a spell check engine for Flash and AIR)

And, of course, you can check out the beta versions of Flex (“Hero”), Flash Builder (“Burrito”), and other more common software. You may have also caught wind of Wallaby, which converts Flash to HTML.