With Telerik UI libraries, Progress aims to equip .NET ninjas with a full arsenal of weapons, helping to create beautiful, modern and future-proof applications quickly and intuitively. The vendor states that with its over 1,250 UI components for all .NET platforms, as well as various themes, skins and customization options, Telerik users report cutting development time by up to 50 percent. Web
We have used the Telerik UI controls for our Admin user experience. We found that this lead to consistent user experience, with feature rich functions already provided. Effectively this meant that hour for hour, using the Telerik UI improved productivity in creating screens with more functions than using the default controls in ASP.NET. At this point most of our focus with the Telerik controls is User Interface oriented.
Over the course of months/years, various security exploits and other issues are discovered and patched in AIR, often requiring you to rebuild and resubmit mobile apps to the various storefronts. This happens often enough that it's worth mentioning as a major con.
While development on Adobe AIR seems to be fairly constant, there is very little communication between the community and Adobe regarding the future and general support of AIR. The track record of Flash (and particularly Flash Mobile) does not inspire much confidence that Adobe intends to support Flash/AIR for years to come.
Adobe AIR does not seem to perform as well (in terms of raw performance, memory usage, framerates, responsiveness, etc.) as other hybrid solutions for certain tasks. For example using shaders tends to be experimental still, and graphic/animation intensive projects often require the use of third party frameworks such as Starling.
The Telerik UI has become part of our staple development tools. We can not be as productive without the feature set available to us in the Telerik UI ASP.NET AJAX control package.
Although Adobe AIR is just an SDK without an actual "UI" it's commonly used within Flash, Flash Builder, or FlashDevelop. Considering the integration with Flash IDE, there are very few tools that can compete with its features.
Progress Telerik UI is very usable and one of the best tools to use by the front-end development engineers in our team. It has helped us to improve the overall design of our existing and new applications. Also, the time to build applications has also been reduced effectively and we are able to focus on other areas of improvement to deliver a better user experience for our customers.
Telerik UI support is what you are paying for. If something does not work you ask them for an example of how to solve your use case. The SEO on their sites is awesome and so well bedded into Google. The videos are good, [they're] not used much but their examples and DoJo examples make all the difference.
Originally, Adobe AIR was the only game in town, and its blend of flexibility in platforms it could publish to (PC, Mac, iOS, Android), ease of use, and familiarity made it the clear choice. Now Adobe no longer supports it, and we’ve found the transition to Harmon unworkable for us.
Progress Telerik UI provides a large amount of language support, demos, and documentation. While the competition is still great in their own right, Progress Telerik UI has provided enough resources to cover a number of current and future projects without having to expand to other libraries.