I was reading the rather brilliant AS3.0 book by Colin Moock today, when a thought suddenly popped into my head: what if the iPhone could run the Adobe Air runtime. Just think of this scenario:- I could create a RIA in Flash using AS3.0 which I could deploy on a website. Lets say its a Rich Text Editor, or Blog editing tool. I could then easily convert this to run on the desktop for Mac, Windows (and soon Linux) without much or any extra coding. I could then also deploy it straight to the iPhone. The idea of create once, and deploy many could be a real reality. Some may ask, what is the point...

Just to prove that I don’t just rave about Mac’s and slag off Windows, this post is about Apple’s latest treat – The MacBook Air. Apple is back at doing what it does best. Marketing a product that isn’t that great, so well that you feel you can’t live without it (iPhone, iPod Touch). I’ve decided to gloss over the good points in favour of the bad. After purchasing a MBP last year, I was jealous to hear that a newer and sexier model was out. The jealousy soon turned into glee as I read the specs. However Apple may like to jazz it up, the MBA (MacBook Air)...

I have recently updated my Flash based desktop RSS reader to an Air application. Air is Adobe’s answer to a cross browser runtime that allows developers to further blur the divide between web and desktop. For this example the user can select an RSS feed and view the contents away from the browser. There are two feed’s; news and downloads. Students on my asp.net course can now use the application to quickly and easily check for new tutorials or news on the site without having to launch the browser. As Air has the advantage over the Flash Player of being able to read and write to the...