I've been testing pre-release builds of AIR 2.0 since January and am pleasantly surprised by the improvements over 1.5.x.<p>Their inclusion of the WebKit release that ships with Safari 4.x is enough to grin about (which introduced SquirrelFish Extreme and a native JSON object, so clients do not have to implement JSON parsing in AS3 or pass eval'd objects back through the security sandbox).<p>Beyond that, support for CSS transitions, animations, and canvas are welcome as well. I've not had a need to play with multitouch or the native process API, but they're great to have baked in.<p>I'm particularly looking forward to the Android SDK. It's a shame the AIR packager for iPhone is no longer maintained, but that's water under the bridge. It'll be nice to have a framework like this which allows for much easier UI skinning and definition than the stock SDK. PhoneGap et al are great - don't get me wrong - but it's nice to have a choice of platforms.<p>AIR is far from perfect, but it's a solid runtime to work in if you're building an app that has to be cross-platform, is media or network-intensive, and should behave more like a native app than something wrapped in a browser. Kudos to the AIR team on a good release.
It is unfortunate that AIR doesn't get more press action than it already does. If you need to develop client-side apps and are already familiar with web technologies (HTML/JS), you can jump in swimming. You get a brain-dead simple API that adds common OS-related tasks like loading and saving files. And it's completely cross-platform!<p>My small company builds custom AIR apps for clients in real-time. Take the command-line compiler, a dash of AWS's services and database-driven configuration files and the system builds one-of-a-kind cross-platform apps in seconds. It's the closest thing to fill-in-the-blank software that I've found.
Sometimes I feel a little schizophrenic, because writing apps for the browser using Flex makes me want to tear my hair out but writing desktop apps with Flex/AIR is awesome (especially with the Mate framework).<p>I wish AIR had the native processes when I was building Naughty America Direct, one of the big things I wanted to be able to do was automatically add the videos to iTunes after they were downloaded.
<i>With a few clicks, the Adobe AIR “badge” embedded on the app download page takes care of installing or updating to the right version of AIR if needed.</i><p>You mean I <i>still</i> can't just give users an installer, but instead need to walk them through some "install this, then come back to this page and install this other thing" rigoramole?<p>This was my first reaction to AIR 1.x as well: if your users can tell which runtime you're running on, it's not doing well. This "separate download" rubbish isn't the only reason that VB6 and Delphi took off and Java didn't, but I suspect it played its part.