Adobe Air: The End of Design and Banners
February 26th, 2008 | by Brad King |We’re building a content management system as part of a project here in Media Informatics. Along the way, my student worker came to me and showed me Microsoft Silverlight, a cool environment that enables developers to create applications that work online and offline seamlessly.
It’s a difficult task to describe how it works exactly, in some measure because I’m not an expert at programming - and the developer environment is so foreign at times that I feel overwhelmed trying to understand what it can do. Still, I was duly impressed with its functionality.
Imagine having a desktop application for your favorite site (eBay) that, when launched, allows you to drag-and-drop information from your desktop (say, a picture of a computer you want to sell) right onto the application - and have it uploaded directly to eBay.
Sounds cool, but not that exciting. The thing is: Microsoft Silverlight — and more likely its competitor, Adobe Air — are going to change the way everyone uses the Web…and it’s going to single-handedly usher in the post-banner era.
The Adobe Air eBay application about knocked me on my knees when I watched it. I’ve been preaching the end of the banner for about a year. With keyword search, adblock software, the rise of Firefox and the coming 3D Web — it’s not hard to see that people are going to make money in three ways: selling products, keyword search and lead-generation.
Adobe Air and MS Silverlight are going to hasten that. Not only does this allow any user to design your home page (so forget about all of that time spent on web development and placing banners) , it puts serious emphasis on DATA and not information. Add to that: someone smart is going to (or is already) creating an RSS-type reader for these desktop applications that will store all of the information from the sites you visit in one place.
This is a snippet from my story on Adobe Air:
Adobe Air’s runtime environment allows developers with access to API (application programming interface) kits from companies to create customized versions of the Web experience — without the browser. Developers with Flash and HTML abilities can take the information structures of a Web site and create an application that users can download to their desktop, which would then operate just like any other desktop application.
This would allow — among other actions — users to drag and drop information from any Web site onto their desktop.
and…
Adobe Air — along with Microsoft’s Silverlight — are new tools for developers who want to unbundle information from Web sites. Effectively, it democratizes design by allowing anyone with basic Web development skills to create customizable environments for their favorite sites.
For end users, the browsing experience is then integrated on the desktop, allowing users to store histories, seamlessly update current information which can be accessed even when they are offline and drag and drop information from a Web site directly to the desktop.
