on AIR Bus Tour: Washington D.C.

Sitting in the balcony at the Adobe on AIR Bus Tour in D.C. (I guess Falls Church sounds less impressive) ...

Lots of interesting presentations and discussions on Adobe's new runtime environment, AIR. AIR extends Adobe's previous offerings by providing desktop application development capabilities to programmers already familiar with either ActionScript / MXML or HTML / AJAX web development. Adobe's gone to great lengths to make this web to desktop transition as painless as possible, and I've gotta say, they've done a good job. The most compelling reasons for AIR development (as I see it), is cross-platform consistency, a clean API set, and the overall media hotness of flash within a networked desktop application. As not to sound too much like an Adobe evangelist, I'll just stop now.

My only gripe about this tour is the lack of focus on anything Flex 2/3. The line is blurring between Flex and AIR development, and I'd like to see where exactly those boundaries extend. For example, to what extent can one take advantage of the new JavaScript bridging capabilities within a Flex 3 application, if any at all? I suppose I just need to start playing around with Moxie ...