It's important to note that AIR has two user interface toolkits: HTML via the Webkit rendering engine and their Flex UI toolkit (declarative grids, buttons, etc) with support for Flash in both cases. The rise of webKit as a platform for rich networked applications is quite interesting. IE has been used extensively as a UI toolkit for desktop apps but is waning in that context due to antiquated technology and the windows only issues.
Firefox has a thing called XUL Runner which allows creating applications, and a really nice UI toolkit called XUL, but the Mozilla organization is focused on the consumer over the application developer and is strongly motivated to participate in standards based technology, limiting their willingness to jump ahead. The XUL toolkit is especially interesting given it's robust handling of platform UI consistency. There's support for swapping the orientation of buttons based upon platform standards for instance. That's a big issue for "RIA"s -- consistency with the platform. Still, at least among the twitter crowd, it doesn't seem to be slowing down the adoption of custom desktop applications for twitter and, as of late, services like friendfeed and facebook. Webkit is clearly taking over as the embedded HTML rendering engine of choice. With it's inclusion in the iPhone and Android and rapid evolution of features, my bet is on Webkit as the most common technology in apps which form hybrids between web and desktop. The HTML 5 sqlite database support makes standalone applications, and offline persistence of online data, easy and a re-usable skill. Apple is pushing standards in interesting ways to optimize Webkit's success -- like CSS transform animations (eg. http://surfmind.com/lab/typhographic/). The Canvas tag, providing a pixel based drawing palette, also means almost any visual effect is attainable. Library's like RaphaelJS (http://raphaeljs.com/) provide a more DOM like development experience with canvas. Webkit is a delightful platform to work with for the developer use to being held back by IE and hampered by variations across browsers while still taking advantage of those skillsets. Of all the features enabled by OS native code, notifications and desktop overlays seem to be the most commonly deployed. Adobe AIR has a strong sandbox limiting local code to a greater degree than say Firefox extensions (unsure about Silverlight). A new contender, Titanium (http://www.titaniumapp.com), offers a webkit based UI environment with native installers for Win/Mac/Linux, as well as full desktop access and integration of Ruby & Python, as well as the standard notification and windowing APIs. I don't see these technologies offering alternative OS experiences, but I am excited about the ability to provide applications which are more useful than web applications in a variety of ways, using the technology I've spent over a decade mastering :) Cheers, Andy http://delicious.com/andyed/js On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Petroff, Greg <[email protected]> wrote: > If you are working with Air or Silverlight ... where do you think it's > going? What is the current state of the tools? There yet? Not? How do we > see these changing what we do? > > Love a discussion on what changes with them? What's the same? Are they > harder to build and develop then other alternatives? What do they mean > for the programmers/developers we work with? > > Personal interest here: > > Looking for examples of AIR and Silverlight that mimic a singular > environment...i.e. almost like creating your own os with its own > behaviors, affordances etc. where the environment for work takes over > from the standard desktop. Anyone have any favorite examples? > > -gp > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
