Although still relatively new at Beta 2, Adobe AIR has been drawing a lot of attention from web developers. Air’s claim to fame is the ability to package up Flex, Flash, or regular HTML/JavaScript/CSS web applications and deploy them to the desktop. Like Adobe Flash, the Adobe Integrated Runtime will be the same regardless of what operating system the user is running. At the moment AIR is only available for Windows and Mac, although Adobe claims Linux support is in the works. One of the greatest benefits of AIR comes to Flex developers who are able to change their application to from Flex to AIR by changing only their root MXML tag. If you’re interested in giving it a try, downloading AIR and check out the AIR Showcase (I recommend the Ebay project). For the presentation I’ll be using Eclipse 3.2.2 with the Flex 3 beta 2 plugin in conjuction with the Adobe AIR SDK.

Twitter is booming website that enables users to update their profile with short messages of under 140 characters. The idea is that users can use this functionality anyway they want, with the most common being showing your current status — kind of a “what I’m doing now” application. Twitter has quickly become the application of choice for developers wanting to make quick mock-ups. The reason for this is a very well designed developer API that takes the fuss out of creating this kind of application. Twitter has a REST API that gets quite a bit of attention from the Rails folks, but there are also ActionScript APIs available for AS 2 and 3! To be fair, the ActionScript APIs are simply wrappers to the REST API, but it makes it easy as can be for Flex developers to use the Twitter API.