Modify Colors
Posts in air
AIR for Linux Leaves the Labs
Adobe announced today that Adobe AIR for Linux has left Adobe Labs and is now offered for download alongside AIR for Windows and OS X. You can read more about the release over at Ars Technica, if you are interested. The interesting question to me is: how does this change the Adobe AIR vs. Appcelerator Titanium landscape.
For anyone who does not know, Appcelerator Titanium is an open-source alternative to Adobe AIR. Unfortunately, the Linux client has not yet been released. This is AIR’s biggest advantage – it is already out for all platforms. Titanium, on the other hand, will still be a while longer.
To counter this, though, is Titanium’s open platform. Having an application be closed-source is one thing, having all your applications run on closed-source software is a different thing. If Adobe decides not to support Linux any more, Linux doesn’t get AIR. With Titanium, though, the community could just pick up the code and keep going.
Overall, it wll probably come down to implementation and timing. Right now, Titanium is a bit behind, but they certainly have a chance to chatch up, especially since AIR still crashes my browser when I try to download AIR applications.
Appcelerator Titanium: Like AIR, But Better
A while ago Adobe released Adobe AIR. AIR was a way of running web applications on your desktop, even when you don’t have an internet connection. The great thing about AIR was that it was cross-platform, so, in theory, you could run any AIR application on Windows, OS X, or Linux. The problem was, that never really worked. Only a few applications really ran right on Linux. In fact, the Linux client never even came out of beta. Worse, AIR was not open-source. Normally, I would not be that bothered by an application being closed-source, but for a technology that could conceivably be running all of our applications, open-source would be far preferable.
Finally, it looks like the right thing has come along: Appcelerator Titanium. Appcelerator Titanium claims to be “the first open platform for building rich desktop applications.” Basically it lets you write desktop applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, just as if you were writing a web application. Like Adobe AIR, though, you don’t need an internet connection to run Titanium applications.
Appcelerator Titanium is a promising replacement for Adobe AIR that, in the long term, would be a far superior option, since it would not take us down a route of closed systems controlling our applications, our data, and our computers, but instead allow for an open way to develop great web applications that run on any desktop, no matter the OS.
Appcelerator Titanium can be downloaded now for OS X or Windows. The Linux version will be coming soon.
Due to Adobe’s AIR, a technology that lets web applications be run on the desktop on Linux, Mac, or Windows, it seemed like Adobe was headed in the direction of platform independence. Now, Adobe has made those plans official with their Open Screen Project.
I view the project, which is intended to bring Flash and Air to everything from TVs to PCs to handheld devices and UMPCs, as an official statement from Adobe (and a number of other prominent companies that are also involved) that they believe, as I do, that cross-platform internet-connected applications are the future. Because Adobe is seeing this so early, they will likely become a great supporter of Linux, even if they don’t try to.
As cross-platform applications start to take off, thanks to AIR and other similar projects, the barrier to adopting Linux is going to shrink and quickly disappear. At that point, I think we will begin to see more and more switchers to Linux and other smaller operating systems.
Because of this, Adobe is going to play an essential part in destroying a key barrier to the adoption of Linux.