What don't I like about Adobe Air?
Adobe Evangelist Dan D. says he's not sure what I don't like about Adobe Air.
What don't I like about Adobe Air? Seems like such an easy question.
1. The Sins of the Acrobat.
Adobe will forever leave a bad taste in my mouth because of the sins of the Acrobat. Acrobat reader is an invasive, openly hostile application toward users. Look no further than the advertising space it puts on the User Interface. If that's not enough, look at the way Acrobat shovels third-party applications at you (Yahoo toolbar). Then, for the hat-trick, look at the bizarre services, updaters and installers that come along with a _simple_ document reader.
2. Closed sourced wrapped around Open Source.
There's nothing so magical about whatever Air's secret sauce is that couldn't be improved upon by giving the raw source code to the public, especially considering it uses WebKit. I feel this way about _all_ software. Given the hostility of the Acrobat reader, why shouldn't we assume that behind the scenes air is spying, tracking, recording, and storing data?
3. Draining the Developer Pool.
Wouldn't it have been incredible if Snitter was _actually_ an OSX program instead of a blurb of adobe code floating within the host Operating system? Instead of developing a native ap, however, the fine people behind Snitter are developing an air ap. Good for adobe. Not so good for the host OS. And, probably not so good for the developers as well when the Air platform is changed to suit Adobe's whim.
4. All-new security holes.
Any hole in Air/Adobe's Runtime will quickly become a cross platform vulnerability. Imagine the phishing implications alone. (A letter claiming to eBay tells you to install the new EBay Air application) Sweet!
So is this ill-informed ravings of a tin-foil hat wearing looney. Kind of. Here's a great list of ten reasons to love and ten reason to hate air.
- heygabe's blog
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I definitely see where you are coming from with a lot of these points. Being a dual booter, the fact that I can't have the AIR apps I love on Linux kinda kills me. Alas, Adobe isn't the only one that is slow to develop for Linux users.
I think that the fact that they are even working on an AIR for Linux is great (when Ryan Stewart came to talk to us at Web414 he mentioned this, as well as at OnAIR - Chicago) - it is going to be a slow process to get people to develop for Linux as quickly as they do for both Windows and Mac. As far as business model goes - I can understand attacking the biggest markets first. For the users though, it is quite a PITA.
re: Snitter
The really great thing about AIR is that anyone can really develop an app for it - it doesn't require a vast knowledge of programming to be able to put something together - and doesn't have to know the workings of Windows, Mac, and Linux OSes to get it to be cross platform. That being said, remember that Snitter was developed by Jonathan Snook - a freelance designer/developer that has no affiliation with Adobe.
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Submitted by Ashe (not verified) on Sun, 02/03/2008 - 13:53.1. Adobe Acrobat, er, Reader... whatever it's called now, used to be a nice application to view PDF files. I use Preview.app for 95% of my PDF viewing needs nowadays, and Acrobat when I need to. It's bloated, slow, and always wants me to update. FAIL! I don't even think I have Acrobat on my Intel Mac at home...
2. Well, I am torn here... I am glad Adobe is at least a little bit embracing the open source idea, but you run into the problem of certain dorks saying "AIR is open source!" when it's not really, like 100% open source, or close, and typically it's like a command line compiler is open source and you'll pay huge bucks for a GUI tool.
3. As said, it should be simple to create an AIR app, and writing an OS X app is not, so I reserve judgment on this.
5. (Yeah, I skipped 4.) AIR has that Skype problem, where I use it so seldom that every time I launch it, it's out of date. This is just for you Gabe: http://www.flickr.com/photos/raster/2241079037/
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Submitted by raster on Mon, 02/04/2008 - 06:01.