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Comment by jcl | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about AIR, myself, which was partly why I asked. The impression I get is that the runtime and Flex SDK are free, so you can theoretically put together applications without paying Adobe. Adobe charges money for the Flex Builder IDE, though, which is supposed to make development easier, and it looks like other Adobe products can output AIR applications.

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you have fallen into adobe's trap. that's exactly what they want you to believe.

yes, it's perfectly possible to download the free sdk, and write your first "hello world" app that prints a line of text to the face of the applet. so then you start planning on how you're going to do this. and then say you want to do something simple, like for example, use flash gui controls, then you'll learn the horrible truth. it's impossible to do such a thing without buying adobe flash cs3, which costs 700 bucks.

and even if you spend that 700 bucks, adobe flash cs3 is a gigantic steaming turd. i spent a day or two trying to make my peace with it, and failed.

so i decided to forgo flash gui controls altogether, and used javascript controls instead.

We're using Flex Builder which should allow us to create all of the GUI controls we need. It's $250. Regardless, it's true that the free tools aren't all that useful.

i never investigated flex builder, so i'll take your word for it. javascript controls turned out to be the solution for me, so i didn't look any farther than that.

Thank God for HN! (and thank you for your post)

Thanks. They automatically detected me as "Linux" so I couldn't find the non-beta info (although I didn't spend a lot of time on their site looking).

Flex is pretty cool. It allows you to publish applications to the web or to the desktop via AIR without many changes at all. If Java is approved, then I can't see why AIR applications wouldn't be. The security model is a bit more strict than Java.

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