JD on EP

One shaky phrase in the CNET article: "AIR is one of a growing number of browser plug-ins coming onto the market. Others include Microsoft's Silverlight and Google Gears."

Adobe Integrated Runtime is not an in-the-browser plugin. It is a way to bring standard web pages to the desktop, with file-writing privileges, rich windowing abilities, normal installation procedures, more. It turns Ajax or Flash into desktop applications.

The Player story is important. The current Adobe Flash Player 9, installed on virtually all the world's computers today, will play this new stuff fine. Tonight's update just adds improvements to playback. You can deploy today.

Player Product Manager Emmy Huang has the scoop. Biggest item here is that video scaling uses any local video acceleration hardware by default, in order to get the widest testing base. The risk here is that the symptom of a board we haven't yet handled can be drastic. If you crash on fullscreen video, then please turn this setting off (in "Settings", via context-click), and let the team know your acceleration configuration, thanks.

Tinic Uro will have a continuing series of articles this week about the mechanics of the new Player release.

The other key Player r60 resources are the release notes, FAQ, and feedback form.

Ted Patrick has been giving a Flex overview this past week... I don't see a single link for all these articles, but if you page back you can find a good quick read of the changes.

My personal favorite is the incremental loading of Flex Framework... Adobe Flash Player will retain common code elements across Flex projects, so that your unique deliverable files can be itsy-bitsy-teensy.

(Ted gets so excitable, I'm glad it shipped so he can relax. ;-) (And last week, when that blurred screenshot was up, and people kept saying "It looks like the new name starts with an 'A', and is three letters, can anyone guess what it is?", then I was so relieved that nobody guessed... well, I guess there's no use thinking about that now, I'm just relieved the topic never came up.... ;-)

Techmeme crowd picked up on it early. The archives have shifted a bit in the past, so I'll collect weblog commentary that I find from Techmeme here:

Read/Write Web, Scobleizer, Mashable, TechCrunch.

Commercial press is harder to track, because all the different hometown newspapers actually use just a few sources of writers... it's easy for original reporting to get buried in the slide of syndicated feeds.

Eric Auchard of Reuters was strongly interested in AIR during the press tours... the Washington Post and Scientific American are two of the publications using this account.

The Computerworld account by Heather Havenstein is also the source article for other online magazines.

All the stuff I see so far in Google News is the above two articles, plus Martin LaMonica's CNET piece, and a few newspapers which republish the press release, or snippets from other articles.

Also: Andy Patrizio at Internet News.

More staff postings:

Mark Anders describes change Flex 3, AIR, and Player r60, and what each piece of the puzzle means to him.

Matt Chotin describes the news from the perspective of the Flex team, and also has a introduction to Flex 3 article up on DevNet.

Mike Chambers has a corresponding DevNet article on the Adobe Integrated Runtime.

Adobe On Air is the North American bus tour. Here's the weblog, a video, and Campbell Anderson has a photo of the bus.

There's also a contest "to build the most unique Adobe® AIR(tm) application." (The word "unique" actually describe a binary condition, and something can't be "more unique"... it's like saying "more virginal".) The grand prize sounds great: "The Best of Show winner will receive the trip of a lifetime, a travel certificate valued at up to US$100,000, to be used for the travel of your choice!" And the Rules PDF shows that legal requirements have been met to run this contest in a satisfying variety of countries (although, regrettably, not all the nations of the world).

Adobe Labs also a special portal for Ajax on the desktop.

Ryan Stewart has an overview of the set of announcements.

For the basic "What does AIR do?", here's a nice tight list at one of the FAQs:

What does Adobe AIR let me do?

Here are a few of the capabilities in the beta release of Adobe AIR:
locally installed applications are responsive and stable.
applications have complete control over UI.
no browser or operating system dependencies.
rich OS integration -- task bar, dock, drag and drop, native menus and windowing.
access local file system or local database.
full HTML applications and embedded, configurable HTML control.
compatible with open source Ajax frameworks.
easily call ActionScript 3 from JavaScript for video, transparency, animation, sockets, etc.
Adobe AIR applications have a single installer for all OSes.
easy application and runtime update.