Comment by Ari_Ugwu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ari_Ugwu | Hacker News Reader

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Some companies have all the right ideas and for whatever reason still can't execute.

Adobe AIR beat things like Electron and PhoneGap to market by years. IMHO the issue with Adobe is this insistence on 'open' still having various vary opinionated elements. Adobe Air for example had a lot of good ideas but still attempted to evangelize Flash and ActionScript. I _think_ MS is trying to pivot of that grave now with .NET Core. Time will tell if the Mono-to-Wasm or .NET Core Native projects have legs.

I was so very excited about Adobe Air and wrote a production application with it in 2009.

I _think_ a sweet spot for WASM data processing. The data visualization space should explode once I can with data in the browser at near native speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

To be fair, AIR was not the first in the domain. Mozilla had XUL/XULRunner ~15 years ago, which could be used to quickly develop kick-ass cross-platform applications in JS (and is still, by and large, the base of Thunderbird and Firefox).

Sun thought that they had something like that with Java Apps ~20 years ago, except they forgot to make installation and UX compelling, and the memory requirements were unacceptable for the time.

I remember trying to do stuff with Adobe AIR and it just felt like a collosal waste of time. As soon as you tried to do anything that interacted outside of their sandbox you were severely limited. I remember some guys did a hack called cairngorm that I looked at but it seemed quite cumbersome. Then there was support, I think it was only after a few years they just gave up and spun it off to Apache ... you need to stick at it longer than that to establish yourself ...

Remember when Adobe AIR was going to come to Android? That would have been an amazing write once run anywhere experience.

It did come to Android.

For a while before being terminated, Flash got a native code backend.

You can build Android apps (and iOS too!) with Adobe AIR today. In fact, it's been possible since about 2010.

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