Mohtalim

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/showcase/

I think this is important, but honestly I'm still not sure what it is.

I guess it enables Rich Internet Applications?

It sorta sounds like it's trying to supplant html and move on to a common internet enabled application development language?

Some people are saying that this is just developers trying to gain more access to desktop resources and that it's the next big thing: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_ar ... 8&id=20245.

I personally thing that this is just in response to Microsoft's Silverlight. Silverlight is essentially a replacement for flash, so Adobe decided that they needed to take the browser out of the equation to maintain marketshare.

Of course, another way to look at it is that it's the third (or possibly fourth) generalized development platform. You have .Net that allows compilation of lots of different languages into a common execution environment, you have Java that's expanding to allow Python and Ruby to be executed within the JVM, and now you have AIR which allows html/javascript and actionscript to be used to develop desktop applications.

It also gives Adobe a platform to expand upon software as a service: http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/A ... 7-09-45-15

hopefully it will generate money

heh