Last year I wrote about my experience on various Twitter AIR clients (Twitter AIR Client Smack Down). In that time, AIR was still in beta and I got some crashes, freeze and errors. Now AIR 1.0 was out for a while and it’s time to compare it again.

My criteria is simple. I look on Twitter Fan Wiki for the list of AIR clients. If any client provides no screenshot on its site, it will be failed at first sight. These developers should learn how to design a usable product site before developing any application.

All clients are tested on Mac OS X Leopard with MacBook Air.

I got this book from FOWA and left it on my desk (along with other FOWA souvenirs). When I was interested in AIR, I go googling first and never realized that I already have a good AIR guide one-foot-away.

(cover picture from O’Reilly)

The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide is written by Adobe developers and published by O’Reilly. It gives a good introduction to develop an AIR application by HTML/JavaScript, not Flash/Flex.

The list price is £9.99 but don’t worry, Adobe has given away this book around to promote AIR. Furthermore, the authors also released the electronics copy under Creative Commons license. Grab it now (PDF link).

I also found one good review of this book from the web.

P.S. I will send this book to elixer as the prize for Blognone 6000th sweepstake.

As mentioned in last post, I’m interested in Adobe AIR and want to evaluate its power. The quickest way to evaluate any development platform is to develop a real world application using that technology. So, here comes my top-secret project, the Blognone AIR Reader but unfortunately, it’s failed so fast.

I follow this tutorial to create a simple RSS reader by AIR.

The first problem is this tutorial is for AIR beta 1 and AIR beta 2 comes with new sandbox security model. Then I need to modify the code to support the beta 2 runtime I installed. After that, I need to learn Spry for a little bit to know its functions and power. When everything is ready, I just find out that AIR browser doesn’t handle Thai line-breaking !!!

From my investigation, AIR uses Apple’s WebKit as its rendering engine and Adobe doesn’t know that only WebKit is not enough for Thai people (Safari do line-breaking via ATSUI). Line-breaking is country-specific issue and need experienced i18n team to handle. Browsers with no line-breaker is unusable in Thailand.

Since AIR runtime is closed-source, I have no choice left, only wait for Adobe fix in future release. Anyway, I contact Ryan Stewart, AIR community evangelist at Adobe to pass this issue to Adobe i18n team. Hope that might help.

Update: People who found this page from Google should look on the second comparison Yet Again, Twitter AIR Client Smack Down, posted on May 2008.

Long time, no see. Welcome back to application Smack Down section.

My trip to FOWA made me realize that Adobe AIR has a very bright future. The only reason I place it far ahead of Microsoft Silverlight is the ecosystem, not technology. Adobe has long established, mature Flash/Flex community and it’s definitely AIR’s huge advantage. (Don’t worry about JavaFX, it seems like a tiny dust in this industry. Nobody uses Java anymore)

So I decide to keep eyes on AIR. Subscribing to On AIR blog is not enough, I want to try the actual AIR feeling since I’ve tested it when released. I choose the addictive Twitter to be my test application. The criteria is quite simple, give me the same feeling as Twitter via IM, that’s all.