Sazbean

Yes, it was called Apollo at one time. Considering how many people re-reference AIR as Apollo in conversation, Adobe should stick with their first marketing idea in the future.

Adobe AIR is the new runtime desktop environment that has the kids in Silicon Valley all excited. Here are some sample apps for reference. According to Mark Blair, Adobe’s Pacific technical director, the idea behind AIR is this: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere

It makes some sense, since so much development effort is being put into online applications, that you be able to tap into those apps on the desktop. In this way, AIR applications become non-browser dependent interfaces to big online applications like eBay, Amazon and others. Google and Microsoft are both thinking along the same lines (though at entirely different levels) with Google Gears and Silverlight. Gears is a low level persistence layer that syncs your online gmail, Calender [As noted in the comments, I should have said Reader and Docs ~aaron] and others with offline surrogates. Silverlight is aiming more directly at Adobe Flash/Flex and has only recently made noise about a desktop controls component. This late game hesitation on the part of Microsoft is understandable given their already commanding position on the desktop with .Net Really, for my money AIR’s largest technological competitor is JavaFX. Both are platform independent, VM based technologies. Until Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 comes calling, this space is Adobe’s to loose. Adobe has both a head start over Sun and a laser beam focus on their product’s polish which Sun typically lacks. If you have a web application and your customers are demanding UI options beyond the browser, take a look at AIR

Interesting technology notes, AIR uses WebKit, SQLite and Tamarin for its web rendering, data storage and ActionScript Virtual Machine respectively. WebKit is the renderer used by Apple’s Safari and native to the iPhone. Tamarin is a very fast ECMAscript VM that supports full runtime error reporting, built-in debugging, and binary socket support. It was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and will be used in SpiderMonkey to speed up its JavaScript support.