Adobe AIR Takes Productivity Offline

At its Engage event, held yesterday in San Francisco, Adobe announced the release of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software. The software, which has been in beta since last June and is now available for free download, allows applications and the content they produce to migrate from the Web to a user's desktop and even to mobile devices.

Adobe has created a free, open-source tool called Flex 3.0 that allows developers to write applications for the AIR environment. Applications already available include eBay Desktop, which provides interest-specific feeds and bid alerts without having a Web browser open; NASDAQ Market Replay, which lets traders replay the day's market activity on their desktop, and a New York Times service, cheekily titled ShifD, for transferring content like restaurant locations, recipes, movie showtimes and book reviews to desktops and mobile devices.

In addition to releasing ShifD, The New York Times addresses the release of Adobe AIR in today's edition and provides some great perspective on what it may mean for the rest of the industry and the future of computing.

Photo of ShifD on a PDA courtesy of The New York Times and BusinessWire