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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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.

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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.

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