Yesterday Adobe released the first alpha of Adobe Air for Linux. I played with it for a while and was quite impressed with it. The installation went along flawlessly on my Fedora Core 8 and I downloaded a couple of applications that worked quite nicely. In the release notes they mentioned that transparency works when using a composite window manager. I switched on the ‘desktop effects’ (as they are called in FC8) and indeed the apps worked perfectly!
The apps I tried where: kuler and Pixel Perfect. Kuler is an application which stores several hundred color combinations which are all very pretty. Pixel Perfect is a simple application which draws a translucent ruler on the desktop. The ruler can be moved around, resized and you can even change the transparency using the mouse wheel. All worked perfectly under Linux. You can download the source and read the article of how it works here. I still need to test local applications tht make use of Air’s features like the local sqlite database, etc.
What really interests me is to use Air and Flex to build cross platform widgets as well as desktop applications. It seems to me, after having a quick peak at the code that Adobe is really pushing this technology under Linux and is not just writing a half working port for Linux.
I will continue to test is and update this post (or create a new one) with the news. For the moment you can learn more at Adobe labs
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April 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Lo acabo de probar en linux, y es cierto: se instala solo, sin ningún problema. Las aplicaciones se distribuyen en paquetes con extensión .AIR, aparentemente, probé la reglita y también se instala fácil y rápido. Me gustó mucho como se crea el paquete distribuible, con certificado (o no) que altera la manera en que otros usuarios ven el instalador. Probablemente me ponga a jugar un poco con el SDK
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I’ve just tried it on Linux, and you’re right: It installs easily without hassle. The applications are distributed in packages with an .AIR extension, apparently. I tried the little ruler thing and it also installs easily. I liked a lot the way it creates the distributable package, with certificate (or not) that alterates the way in which other users see the installer. I’ll Probably start playing around a bit with the SDK