I was introduced to Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) last week when the Adobe AIR tour bus stopped in Portland, OR for a night of introduction and examples of what the product can do. If you haven't heard of Adobe AIR, as I hadn't before attending the mini-conference, it's a "cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop."

So in other words once I build a website and get everything looking good I can package up that same code with Adobe AIR and create an installer for that website. Once the user runs that installer it then installs the website I created onto their computer and they can run it locally. I can also put links on that website which load content from the internet even though they are running the application/website locally. Think of it as a website with an installer package.

The beauty of Adobe AIR is that the browser/framework it's based off of is Safari and when you build an application with AIR you are sure that how the application looks on your computer it will also look the same on anyone else's computer. Windows and Mac systems will display your AIR application the same exact way which in awesome! That will definitely save some development and testing time right there.

For my first project I decided to port over the CAESY Demo website. I created an installer for this website through Flash before but AIR gives me much more control over the presentation of my SWF. AIR allows you to create the installer all with your favorite text editor (NotePad2 is my favorite) and this is also where you can specify to load the application with transparency or windowed and can also specify the size you want it be.

I chose to load mine windowless and transparent so it showed just the SWF file and nothing else. It automatically sized itself to show 100% with and height of the SWF and looked as if it were floating on the desktop. Once I learn more about the program I can create my own custom window so the user can move the application around the screen and minimize and close it as well.

I also tried creating an HTML page with Flash embedded in that but unfortunately at this time AIR does not support embedding of SWF files. From what I;ve read it will be supported with the final 1.0 release (it's currently in beta). So far AIR seems like the way to go for desktop application creation as it allows you to use JavaScript, HTML and/or Flash all at once. Once they get embedding of SWF in HTML files I'll continue my development of the CAESY Demo for AIR.