I’m glad to have a social network otherwise I’d miss out on some great tips. Adobe has published a new development environment for building desktop apps. In their words:

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.”

I used to build desktop apps through Visual Basic back in “the day” but since the web came out I have been developing 100% for the web… until recently when I had to build some cross-platform desktop widgets. For that I turned to the Yahoo! Widget Engine. But it is very limited.

Since AIR uses technologies I’m already developing in, this sounds very interesting. I can’t wait to have some time to learn more about this. It says that it’s cross-platform, but I wonder how cross-platform it is? Obviously Windows and Mac are supported, but what about Ubuntu? If all three are supported (Mac, Windows, Linux), then I’m sold! It looks like, however, only Mac and Windows are supported by the look of their runtime download page.

AIR home page
AIR runtime

I installed the Windows runtime, and it was a very fast download and super quick install. I then installed the snitter AIR app for Twitter and it works really well.

Thanks Chris Harrison for the tip!