This morning I was confronted with an email telling me about Adobe’s new release of Acrobat 9 reader.

Whoop-de-doo I hear you cry…and that’s exactly what I thought (I don’t really care much for PDF). However, I duly went to the download site and noticed a couple of small interesting things. Let me show you Exhibit’s A & B:

Both of these options were presented to me when I went to download. This is a signicant thing. Adobe are now using the pure ubquity of the reader software to distribute the AIR runtime. This means that the installations of AIR and Flash 9 are going to be going through the roof, which is a good thing as it now means that, for us AIR developers, relying on the client user having the runtime installed is a little easier to predict and handle.

Flash and PDF Reader have got to be the most installed items of software Adobe have in their arsenal. Overtime it certainly looks like AIR will be up there with them.

I’ve just seen on one of the many BBC editorial blogs that they have now re-released their age-old windows based news ticker application as an AIR app.

For me this is an interesting one for a couple of reasons - firstly, that this will result in a massive deployment of AIR across potentially hundreds of thousands of users, but also that they decided to not got down the Silverlight for any particular reason (and I’m sure Microsoft were trying to get in on this one).

Anyways, check it out and have a play.  Could it be the start of a new application development “standard” comig into being.

On my way home today I was listening, as always, to one of the many podcasts that I subscribe to.  In this particular instance, I was listening to podcast #11 of the stackoverflow.com podcast hosted by Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky.  The podcast follows the development of stackoverflow.com, but turns largely into a general chat about web technologies and their use.

What I was listening to specifically was a chat between the two answering a question from a listener asking about what they thought of Silverlight.  Generally what they were saying was correct (as I see it) except for one point.  Joel pointed out that he thought flash and silverlight weren’t great for apps online due to factors such as the inability to bookmark pages, copy and paste text etc etc.  He was advocating that web applications were best based in an AJAX interface, it any interaction was required.

Joel then went on to say that he did not believe that Flash or Silverlight would be adopted for online applications as they were distinctly “un-webby”, giving you more of a rectangle in a browser window that tried to be a desktop instead.  Both Joel and Jeff agreed that this would prevent mainstream adoption of Flash and Silverlight for online apps.

However, as you may have predicted,  I disagree with this.  The reason for this is down to one fundamental part of their argument.  For me, the web is a connected set of applications: browsers, email clients, ftp clients etc etc; all providing different services in different ways.  One new element to the party is that of internet-connected applications, which is exactly where I see flash and silverlight winning over anything else.  The problem isn’t the un-webbiness of the rectangle in the browser, the problem is that the browser is built to suit paradigms that are now several years old, and a bit behind the times.  For instance, when was the last time you wanted to create a bookmark in an application other than your browser?

I see tools such as Adobe’s AIR changing the web by quite a margin, dropping the browser back to a pure surfing device.  OK, you might have a very website orientated app (such as Google) which will always be best suited to AJAX and the browser, but others such as eBay make make more sense as a proper standalone internet-connected application (as the San Dimas development is trying to show).

For now though, we are definitely caught in a tricky place where technologies like AIR and WPF are very new and everyone is figuring out exactly what you can do with these new tools.  As experience from the development community increases, as well as interest from prospective clients, I believe the internet will start to change into something very different to the one you are familiar with today.