The eOK .network

Since attending the iX 2007 conference’s academic forum at SMU yesterday, I’ve been full of AIR. Adobe Integrated Runtime that is. That was basically the only thing new I got from the conference, all this talk about new/social media is nice, but I’m a sucker for new and cool tech.

AIR, according to Adobe’s web site, is:

Adobe® AIR™, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

Think Java, just prettier and probably easier to code. (Argh! Flashbacks of my Java programming class emerging!)

Mike Downey, Senior Apollo Product Manager, Adobe Systems (pictured above) gave a really good run through of AIR and its possibilities. Since I heard of Apollo sometime last year, I knew something great was in the making and not till yesterday did I realise how fantastically close they’ve come to true “write once, run anywhere”.

The first thing that came to mind when Mike demoed the useless (but cool) app, ApolloBook, was how similar it looked to Ceros’s web magazine software. Then I thought, how cool would it be if we could have Monkey Magazine in an offline application that works on both the Mac and PC. This technology could transform Ceros into an alternate media distribution channel. Virtual news stands anyone?

There’s so much hype now around this social media, but don’t you think that too much of it is still made up of hypertext? I’m wondering if the future of media is more like Flash-based publications with rich experiences floating on AIR.

Other worthy links:

• Download AIR for PC and Mac from here.
• Good example of AIR in action on finetune. (Better than Pandora and Last.fm if you ask me)

Aside: Kevin mentioned in passing while doing his live video casting of the event that services such as Ustream.tv and Operator11 are perfect for mobile platforms because they store data direct to online servers and not onto the device. I agree and look forward to that day.