@neilmiddleton

Recently, I’ve been seeing much greater interest in web applications from the sorts of people that love living the dark dingy corners of your local Days Inn/Travelodge, the traveling salesman. Typically these people tend to be fairly behind the times in terms of tech as its not a core part of their day. Sure, they might well be up to speed on the latest on mid-sized executive cars, or what their mobile phone can do, but technology? Not unless it’s something their selling.

Now from what I understand, these guys typically carry around several items:  A laptop, a phone, some sample product, and loads of manuals and documentation about what they are selling.  They almost have a boot load of stuff that just gets hauled up and down the country.

This causes a number of problem, namely that documentation needs to be produced whenever something changes, the sales guys needs to read all this stuff to stay up to date, and the management have no real idea of how good their staff’s product knowledge is.  They only really understand the sales orders coming back.

Enter Adobe AIR stage left.

AIR has been around for a while now and I’m pretty sure that it suits the use-case of the mobile worker perfectly.  Therefore, I surprised that they aren’t lapping it up – which I can only put down to a lack of awareness.

So why’s AIR ideal for them?  Well, a number of reasons

1) Offline Ability

AIR apps can work offline, so you can download information to your application and use it as if it were connected to the internet – perfect for reviewing a contacts database or catching up on some documentation.

2) Sync to server

Once you’re on the net paying your extortionate hotel wi-fi charges, you can upload all your changes to the central server – be it updates on what you’ve read and tested on documentation wise, to any sales notes you might have recorded.

3) Install to local machine

Having it locally installed means that it fits into the mindset of your typical not-so–tech savvy salesman.  Users love a desktop icon, and the idea of clicking on it to kick off an app.  It’s something they’re used to and understand.  They don’t need to know it’s really a web application, it’ just an application…

4) Nice simple UI, and integration with desktop

… and because it’s a desktop app, it can look and function like everything else they use, be it Word, Outlook, SalesForce, whatever.  The UI is entirely up to you.

5) Netbooks

These days, the traditional Windows based laptop is a dying breed.  For mobile users, Netbooks are increasingly a major growth area, and these are nearly never running something as up-to-date as Vista.  Normally it’s going to be Windows XP, or some flavour of Linux.  The users don’t know how it works, or how to fix it, but they don’t need to, they just need to know how to use it.

Fancy building an application in WinForms or WPF?  Forget it, it ain’t really going to fly on Linux.  AIR is pretty much the only option.

So, all in all there’s a few reasons why mobile and disconnected users should be using AIR as their platform of choice for their applications, whether they know it or not.  Question is, is there any real limit to the uses it could have?

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