A brief story about the origins of the Adobe AIR

In recent years, we live in an explosion of RIA’s (Rich Internet Application) and the Flash Player bears the main responsibility being the nucleus of what today is known as the Flash Platform. Adobe AIR came to fill a gap that would be necessary sooner or later, have a Flash application running on the desktop regardless of browser. This gave a new direction for RIA applications, you now also have the possibility to have that your preferred site as a desktop application, or much better and more personalized service without the limitations of a web browser, or a better user experience(UX).

A History of Adobe AIR

Let’s remember that Adobe AIR was not the first attempt to take your Adobe Flash in desktop applications, many may not remember, but in mid-2003 the then Macromedia has released a software called Macromedia Central, a software that was designed to run your Flash applications on the desktop without browser.
Macromedia Central did not have much acceptance among developers and users, I believe that one reason is that their distribution model does not attract developers and that you had to pay to deliver their application. Another reason may be that the market was not ready for his concept, something that happened to Adobe Photoshop, say Charles Geschke(co-founder of Adobe) in an interview with Jessica Livingston in the book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (recommend, great read :D), “Adobe Photoshop was released one year before the market is prepared for it”.

In mid-2003 the then Macromedia has released a software called Macromedia Central, a software that was designed to run your Flash applications on the desktop without browser.

Following the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, turned to talk about this software to run RIAs on the desktop environment, some people of the team at Macromedia and others in the Adobe team joined, headed by Kevin Lynch and Ed Rowe. Born a new project code-named Apollo that it would lead to Adobe AIR. 😀

The codenames of the projects were based on NASA space missions in the 50s and 60s. Macromedia Central 1.0 and 1.5 were the code names of Mercury and Gemini, Adobe AIR was codenamed Apollo. Recalling that the Apollo project was the first space mission that actually reached the Moon .
Launching in 2006 under the name AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) with your logo inspired by a boomerang represents the possibility of development with Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex and HTML / JavaScript (or Ajax) and is gaining more supporters every day and conquering your space. Adobe listening to the community, did his homework adding to the extent possible, new features to Adobe AIR 2.0.

The codenames of the projects were based on NASA space missions in the 50s and 60s. Macromedia Central 1.0 and 1.5 were the code names of Mercury and Gemini, Adobe AIR was codenamed Apollo. Recalling that the Apollo project was the first space mission that actually reached the Moon.

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The origins of Apollo
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