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What is AIR? | Contest Winners | Flash 3D Rotation

CATEGORIES: Living In Layers | RC | May 08, 2009

adobe-air-setup I ran into someone yesterday who I started to talk to about a program called Tweetdeck, that was designed as an AIR app. I went on to talk about how AIR is really taking hold in the community and how I think this kind of development is really poised to do some great things.

Confusingly, the person just blankly stared and said “What’s AIR”

I went into a big discussion about it, but then thought to myself “You know.. this has been talked about before on the web.. and I know Lee Brimelow wrote something about it on Layers not too far back.. ”

So I went in and found it. Check it out:

Adobe AIR Turns Web Developers into Desktop Developers by Lee Brimelow
Taking It to the Desktop

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a revolution in the way in which we interact with sites on the Web. A great deal of these changes has been fueled by Flash and other rich media technologies. These days, we think nothing of being on a site that seamlessly incorporates audio, video, and textual content. The traditional, mainstream ideas about user experience and interaction are constantly being challenged, or out-and-out ignored, by a new breed of designers and developers.

The revolution that has taken place on the World Wide Web stands in stark contrast to the world of desktop applications, which has been somewhat stagnant for many years. Desktop applications, for the most part, look and behave very similar to one another. Most consist of different groupings of form elements and menus, and they usually share the same default look and feel for whatever operating system they’re being viewed on. Now let me first say that this is usually preferable so the user has a consistent experience, no matter what they’re doing on the computer. However, there are times when users don’t get the full experience that could be possible if developers had the ability or desire to think outside the box. Apple is probably the best at providing nicely designed, original desktop experiences, but it has been extremely hard for most developers to create similar applications. That is until now.

The world of desktop application development is one that typically required many years of advanced study in languages such as C++, Java, or Objective-C. This put it out of reach for most Web designers and developers, who have a whole set of skills and languages of their own to learn. Adobe recognized that their own community already possessed the potential for creating the next generation of applications for the desktop. This led to the development of Adobe AIR, which sole purpose is to allow the Web design and developer communities to build desktop applications using the skills that they already have.

Click here to read more of the column

Tom Green on Flash 3D Rotations
Tom Green goes over some basics of 3D rotation inside of Flash CS4. You’d be surprised as to how much this program can actually do these days. Click on the video below to check out the tutorial:

3D Rotation in Flash CS4 by Tom Green

Contest Winners
Congrats to Isaiah Shepard for winning this weeks blog contest! I also wanted to thank Mike Saltsman for winning this past week’s Layers TV Contest – the 5′ pano of NYC from Artistic Photo Canvas. Congratulations!!! Something tells me that we’ll be working with some more canvas prints from them really really soon.. so stay tuned to Layers TV and this blog for more of that.

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