By Nels Johnson, June 24, 2008
 So what exactly is Adobe AIR (and what has it done with the Flash Video Player)? At least two answers present themselves, depending on your role as user: 1) A downloadable, installable, third-party system enhancement (like the ubiquitous Acrobat and Flash Player) with which to enjoy Flash video on your desktop as opposed to in your browser, and 2) A runtime environment (like Sun’s Java for Windows IE) for which developers can build killer Flash applications that take over desktops — in a good way — without requiring separate installations (assuming the AIR runtime is already installed). Videographers will likely be more interested in Answer 1 while Answer 2 has significant implications for Web page designers and engineers.
Before we get into detail, please note that, despite the curve required to learn and exploit the AIR studio, FLV video production remains essentially the same and does not require investment in AIR dev tools such as Flex Builder. In other words, FLV files exported from, say, QuickTime Pro will render just as well in AIR desktop apps as from browser-launched SWF files. If you’re a Microsoft Silverlight developer, please substitute WMV for FLV and Expression Studio for Flex. A general analogy, but useful for setting context.
The Adobe Media Player
Like the venerable media players before it, AMP wouldn’t mind being your one-stop solution for desktop video. It does not, however, compete directly with the basic (standalone) QT, WM and Real players. Rather, it antes up at the same high-stakes table as iTunes, Windows Media Center and whatever Real now calls its suite of media services. If you want to play individual FLV clips, you can keep using CS3’s Flash Player, for example, or your favorite free third-party app.
Figure 1: Click a show (any show) in Adobe Media Player.
Figure 1 depicts the home view of AMP 1.0, which requires AIR and will prompt you to install it or upgrade if necessary. Like iTunes and Media Center, AMP is designed to run full screen and organizes your media into various lists including a catalog of available TV shows sorted by genre, network, recommendation, etc. All your local FLVs show up in your Personal Video list, not all of which may actually play in AMP, based on my experience. Unlike iTunes, AMP does not rip CDs (or DVDs). Nor does it offer an e-commerce storefront.
The help text says some videos will be downloaded but the basic MO is streaming. This is consistent with browser-based Flash and gives Adobe an edge when negotiating for AMP-based content, as anyone who has tried to capture a YouTube video well knows. If well-produced Flash streams didn’t look so good or start playing faster than the competition, this MO would be much riskier in the real world.
Overall, AMP looks and feels more like a combination of TiVo and MySpace than a threat to iTunes. It has few if any media-wrangling capabilities and no apparent scriptability for developers (like AIR itself) yet it does demonstrate the fine work Flash video can do with long-form commercial content. Microsoft may be working on IPTV/Media Room for high-quality WMV streaming on a dedicated slice of your incoming bandwidth, but they are still working on it (and trying to convince ISPs of its merits)
. Flash is delivering TV shows to your living room — if not your car and laptop — right now.
AIR Application Development
Not surprisingly, the AIR runtime incorporates WebKit ( www.webkit.org), the open-source HTML render engine that also powers Safari. This permits construction of sophisticated, standards-based AIR apps as if you were building Web sites. Such a concept might make sense only to Web developers, but it is powerful and liberating. Plus you can use AIR to deploy Flex programs fueled by ActionScript and Adobe’s XML-based UI language. Also supported in AIR dev space are basic window management, local file system and clipboard access, drag-and-drop capabilities, basic networking, SQLite and a JavaScript API for persistent storage.
One side effect, of course, to the notion of Web page development as desktop app dev is that developers may succumb to using Web UI idioms instead of desktop UI idioms. AMP is an excellent example of not being this lazy. Also note that while Flex does bundle a set of widgets for programmers who need buttons, trees, etc, it does not give you broad access to native Windows form controls (except for menus).
Figure 2: AIR application development with Adobe Flex Builder.
Is AIR scalable and secure? Depends on what you choose to compare it to, the obvious choices (at this point) being Microsoft’s Silverlight and JavaFX script. These frameworks let developers leverage huge existing .NET and Java libraries (respectively), which extend and exploit their native system resources (both client and server-side). AIR is limited to the local system functionality furnished solely by its own runtime, which produces a low ceiling for scalability. Also, it’s not really good (yet) at computational intensity, nor is it currently designed to be shipped with or embedded in standalone applications. On the plus side, AIR developers get to sharpen their ActionScript 3 skills, along with learning ActionScript JIT which provides greatly improved runtime performance compared to regular JavaScript. Figure 2 shows Adobe Flex Builder in Action.
Security-wise, AIR has a much better (and more flexible) model than embedded SWF files working with standard Web browsers. Gone are Flash’s unwieldy crossdomain.xml restrictions and workarounds such as JSONP in JavaScript to fetch data from remote Web pages. Again, such ideas are meaningful mostly to software engineers (as opposed to managers and videographers) but they can and do decisively affect project timelines.
Other key benefits of AIR dev are ease of deployment and portability. Like Flash, AIR rests on a single code base for building cross-platform applications (as Web pages, depending on your POV) with few if any installation issues for either Windows or Mac OS. Linux support is currently in beta. Even better, Adobe provides a command-line tool for generating AIR app bundles, along with AIR app installer badges which developers can deploy on Web pages to automate installation and assist users with runtime installation (if necessary).
Hot AIR?
Not at all. And, judging by AMP, the core AIR technology is hot indeed (in a good way). Flash Video itself is clearly red hot and now positioned to take on Comcast if not the mighty iTunes. Developers who stretch AIR beyond its current capabilities may get frustrated, but there is no shortage of demand for site-specific browsers and lean/mean desktop apps for connecting to remote Web services. And, unlike Microsoft, Adobe is likely to quickly overcome AIR’s current limitations in future versions.
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