Adobe AIR/Flex 3 prerelease by Ben Forta in North Carolina

Last night, Ben Forta came to Cary, North Carolina to showcase the soon to be released Flex 3 and AIR products from Adobe.

Flex Builder 3 is a compelling upgrade for the product. The IDE offering has actually gone down in price even while adding nice new features like Improved Designer/Developer workflow, a memory profiler, advanced components, and support for the AIR platform.

For more complete information on Flex 3 Features see the labs.adobe.com page.

Also soon to be released is the long awaited Abode Integrated Runtime product. AIR, as it is known for short, offers a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

This means your application can now access the local file system, accept drag and drop assets from the desktop, run outside of the browser and actually run completely offline. The product even contains the SQLite database to help handle offline data.

Many people have not fully grasped one of the most interesting features of AIR. You can write a desktop application using the AIR platform, HTML and Javascript. This will level the playing field by allowing existing web developers and designers to use their current skilling to create functionally relevant desktop applications.

Others in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina have blogged about the prerelease meeting. Jim Priest writes

While I don’t do any Flex/Air stuff at work I still wanted to check things out and I’m glad I did. I was really impressed with both technologies and may have to experiment a bit at home with them…The crowd was a mix of ColdFusion, Flex, Flash developers and some designers...Adobe is pushing more and more stuff open source - BlazeDS, Flex 3 SDK, etc!

Critter posted pics of the event on Flickr. Over 120 people were on hand for the event.

Wayne Sutton from TV station WNCN writes:

Last night the triangle user experience group held what I would like to say one of the largest meetups I’ve seen in a while... Afterwards I had a chance to sit down with Ben and ask him a few questions about the Adobe tour, his favorite AIR apps, future AIR apps and how does he see AIR apps playing a role with social networking sites in the future.

You can see the video interview with Ben Forta on WNCN Local Conversations Site.

Jeffrey Price writes

I was most impressed by the Antropologie e-commerce catalog. I'm definitely looking forward to see what folks do with this technology. AIR looks to deliver "write once, run anyway" applications and it looks good while doing it.

I agree with Jeffery. The Anthropologie demonstration was very compelling. The premise of the application is to show how the Anthropologie catalog of apparel can be displayed in an offline mode. The user can search for an article of clothing based on standardized parameters. The user can also drag an image onto the application and use a color dropper to select a color and use that color as search criteria using very intuitive workflow. When Ben actually drug a picture onto the application, selected a color and the search results automatically filtered, the collective breath left the room. See for yourself at this video of the Anthropologie Catalog AIR application.

Are you prepared for the upcoming RIA arms race? It promises to be interesting!