AIRing my grievances
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe AIR
It's a great middleware solution for designing an app that is compatible with many devices that can pass relatively quickly through QA. We like to use it for developing applications for desktop use that aren't too heavy. Allows for fast, scaleable iterating.
Pros
- Easy to develop for, skills for programs such as Adobe Animate and basic backend translate well to the program.
- Stable across multiple different platforms.
- Can get a working prototype really quickly
Cons
- Adobe Air applications are taxing on a user's CPU, especially considering how simple a lot of the apps are.
- Updating and installing Air based applications is very user unfriendly, often asks for updates that are aggressively pushed to the front of the user.
- As HTML 5 has gotten more and more sophisticated, for basic things a lot of times browser-based apps make a lot more sense.
- It's a safe environment, great for entry-level programmers to get started and show their ideas.
- Easy to get started, build and iterate.
- However, at a certain point, Air applications can become unwieldy so for any serious project. We often would rather build it all outside of a middleware environment.
- Adobe Flash, canvas and CreateJS
Generally stacks up fairly negatively, program definitely has its place, I appreciate what it can allow but now most desktop apps are fine enough as browser based experiences or for personal use mobile is the way to go. Air isn't the best environment for that.
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