(Please ignore the absurdity of the title–I couldn't help myself!)

A little over a week ago, Adobe officially released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) 1.0 along with Flex 3 .  While I've looked into a AIR a bit in conjunction with Flex apps, I've not really gone beyond that.  

However, with the official release, I decided to take another look.

What is AIR?  As the full name explicates, it is a runtime that can be used to, um, run programs on your computer, mobile device, etc.  So as with Microsoft's .NET framework, AIR allows developers to create programs that can be packaged up and installed on these devices.

However, unlike Windows-only or Mac-Only (or Linux-Only) programs, AIR is ambivalent about the OS.  As long as the client machine has the runtime installed, any application developed in AIR can run on it.  This in itself is really cool, and takes the bite off the exclusivity of OS platforms.

But the coolest part about AIR is that you can leverage different technologies when building applications.  For example, a while ago I built an extremely simple Countdown application using Flex 3.  Easy enough.  

But what if I don't want to use ActionScript 3?  No problem!  Using the HTML, CSS More >