Adobe Air Apps: Whats the catch?

[pattyflory]

Whats the deal with Adobe AIR apps? They're all free and none of their websites/pages list any privacy/legal information. I'm not saying none exist but I noticed that some of my recent apps; Doomi, TimeLoc, Klok, and Twirl don't have any of this stuff listed on their sites.

Every app I went through on RefreshingApps.com doesn't have any sort of usage agreement or anything like that. What's the catch?

I get a salesy type vibe from some of them, even some free software in general. But these AIR apps got me thinking.

 

[indianman]

The license for AIR is pretty liberal. Each application will have its own licensing terms.

 

[Deliguy]

Same as every other adobe product. It's free and gets popular and becomes a standard really quickly then suddenly a couple weeks later it doesn't work and ends up costing $800 for a single license.

 

[LazyD]

Same as every other adobe product. It's free and gets popular and becomes a standard really quickly then suddenly a couple weeks later it doesn't work and ends up costing $800 for a single license.

The only catch to Adobe AIR, compared to every other Adobe product it seems is that you arent required to have to an Adobe product to build them per-say.

You can build AIR apps in Adobe Flex which of course requires some sort of IDE made to handle Flex (Adobe Flex Builder or there are some 3rd party ones). Or you can build AIR apps in HTML/JS and pretty much still have full functionality in terms of using the built in SQLite DB, etc. From there you only have to compile it with the command line tools, which I guess in theory, Adobe could lock down to cost $800 for a single license...

 

[sgtryan]

Interesting.

The SDK seems fairly solid. I really like that eBay Desktop app..

 

[kblessinggr]

I thought Air was simply going to be a replacement for Flash.

 

[kblessinggr]

ok, from the look of it, seems like it's trying to compete with java on a desktop platform as opposed to just the web platform. (ie latform independent applications.)

 

[JoshTodd]

I thought Air was simply going to be a replacement for Flash.

If it catches on, Microsoft Silverlight could be more of a Flash killer. The coolest thing about it is that it's a markup language like HTML, so bots can crawl the info, unlike Flash.

 

[kblessinggr]

If it catches on, Microsoft Silverlight could be more of a Flash killer. The coolest thing about it is that it's a markup language like HTML, so bots can crawl the info, unlike Flash.

Well not quite like html, but a markup regardless, but you seem to need some kind of a server setup to get silverlight running right, and there's no visual silverlight editor yet like there is for Flash.

However you can create a silverlight application from php on the fly, something you can't exactly do with flash .