Adobe AIR

Today I decided to check out Adobe AIR.
AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a runtime platform / environment which allows the creation of desktop applications which use existing web technologies such as HTML and AJAX.
Since it is Adobe, unsurprisingly, it also has support for Flash.

To develop an AIR application, all you need is the AIR SDK (which is freely available from Adobe Labs) and your exisiting development tools. E.g. your text editor for your code.

Following the tutorial for developing for AIR with HTML and AJAX, I coded the customary Hello World application.

The tutorial, you follow for its output is complicated. But I think this is due to the demonstration of how a more complex AIR application should be coded. E.g. You use an XmlHttpRequest to display the message to the user.

Development of the AIR application was quite straightforward, so maybe I'll develop something which uses the Digg or YouTube APIs in it.