Adobe AIR: an Apology
The portfolio has just received a long overdue update, with some recent projects added to it, one of which being (slightly prematurely) the CD-Rom I am currently finishing off for Natural England, which I put together using Flex3 and AIR. I mention this because in the process of doing this project I have come to realise that I now owe Adobe a small apology.
A year ago O’Reilly books generously sent me a review copy of their Apollo For Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide. Apollo, or AIR as it has since been re-christened, was only at alpha stage when the book was released, and was full of bugs. I had spent a lot of time hacking away at both that and the documentation-less Flash 9 Alpha that had been released not long before. With AIR, even with the help from some of the development team, I couldn’t get even the most basic of applications to run. Because of my frustration (and because I thought I was oh-so big and clever) I wrote a deeply sarcastic review of the book for Blogcritics.
So this is my apology. I made my peace with Flash 9 and ActionScript 3.0 some time ago, and now, since AIR finally got it’s first 1.0 official release last month, I have had a complete u-turn in my opinion of that too. AIR is an utter delight to work with. And with Flex reaching version 3 to coincide with the release, they go together like Peters And Lee. Harmonious.
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