‘Adobe blurs the line between PC and the Web’: The e-book angle and more
What if you could easily read e-books 30,000 feet over the Pacific and away from WiFi—even if they were normally stored online? And wouldn’t it be great when you were wired in from Katmandu to be able to call up your books normally read on your PC ? What if this could happen seamlessly? The upshot could be fewer hassles for traveling e-bookers, especially those with a mini-fleet of cellphones, PDAs, tablets, you name it. Even stay-at-home folks could benefit.
Adobe’s keen on addressing such issues for e-books and zillions of other apps, such as the new Buzzword, Adobe’s online word-processor, shown here—click on the image for greater detail. Today, as reported in the New York Times, Adobe will “release the official version of AIR, a software development system that will power potentially tens of thousands of applications that merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.” I found a download page here.
AIRED e-bookware in future: Digital Editions
So what about e-books? Adobe’s FAQ for Digital Editions says DE does not yet support AIR, but that such a wrinkle is on the way: “Digital Editions is a specific RIA [link added] built on the current version of the Adobe Engagement Platform [link added], including Adobe Flash® Player 9 and Flex™ 2 software. Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows you to install desktop applications that are built using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and Flash. As a RIA that can operate offline and outside the browser, Digital Editions exemplifies the kind of next-generation application that AIR will enable third-party developers to create, and we expect that Digital Editions will ultimately utilize AIR.”
Benefits, but also security and gotcha issues
I love AIR’s goals. Adobe apparently wants you to be able to read your e-books with fancy formatting preserved even if you’re accessing them from afar—no need for your little cellphone or PDA to store everything. What’s more, people perhaps could pool e-books and other goodies associated with apps; well, ugh, within the limits of copyright law and related annoyances. Furthermore, by breaking down physical barriers, AIR could make it easier to write books or other documents and perhaps collaborate (I’d like more details on that score, in regard to Buzzword and the rest).
The two big questions I have are inevitable—first the security angle, and second the issue of whether Adobe could be using free AIR software to sink its hooks further into the Net and e-books in particular. Might the world be better off with an open approach like a future, fully developed version of Mozilla Labs’ Prism?
Just recently we read of DRMed Flash. What similar tricks might Adobe have up its sleeves? Or unwitting hassles that might arise? For example, when I tried to check out Buzzword, a beta of the Firefox gave me an error message, during a very, very quick look. The Buzzword site worked fine with the older Firefox and even allowed printing, so maybe this hassle is just temporary, but it’s a reminder of the need for careful watching of AIR and related apps. Meanwhile I’ll be curious how people feel about Buzzword vs. Google Docs.
Hybrid apps—for Web and desktop
Back to AIR. Here are more details from InfoWorld: “Supported on Windows and Macintosh, AIR extends to Web applications desktop capabilities such as drag-and-drop, system notification, and local file system access. Applications using AIR can be written using the same technologies commonly used to build Web applications, including Adobe Flex and Flash, HTML, and JavaScript.
“Desktop applications, in turn, update applications automatically and have branding. AIR applications have a Web look and feel. ‘We’re seeing a number of hybrid applications today where developers are writing AIR applications and they also have a Web version of that,’ [Michele Turner, vice president of the Adobe platform business unit] said. AIR’s capabilities include capturing data, pulling it into an Excel file and then uploading that onto a Web application.”
Related: New York Times launching its mobile-to-PC content-sharing service, in mocoNews.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:28 am
My PC is what I have with me after I turn off my internet connection. The line between Web and PC is quite unblurred. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or delusional. The PR flack at Adobe who wrote that tripe is possibly both.
P.S. The only way that “the line between Web and PC” could be blurred is if near universal web access could be guaranteed.
February 25th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
It also “blurs” the difference among platforms - meaning operating systems.
Something that the vendors of those OSs won’t endorse.
Will we see a (hostile? or “friendly”?) takeover of Adobe in 2008?
February 26th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
AIR is Adobe’s version of Microsoft’s .NET or Sun’s Java. It’s a platform they hope will be everywhere, and that will be idiosyncratic enough to make applications written for it difficult to run anywhere else. We’ll see how they do with it — one point in AIR’s favor is that it bundles Flash, which, thanks to YouTube, is very widespread.