What Is Adobe AIR?
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Adobe AIR is a cross-platform application environment that integrate integrated development tools for various web applications, mobile applications, and Adobe Creative Cloud services. The goal of Adobe AIR is to create a simple yet powerful user interface that enables users to easily use rich-text documents. For example, you can develop a website with rich-text documents in your local computer, but have it displayed in the browser of your friend's desktop, who uses Adobe AIR. This type of development requires server-side technologies such as PHP, ColdFusion, Java, Perl, and more. However, since Adobe AIR supports HTML as well, you will be able to develop websites that are viewable in all browsers including Apple's Safari and Google Chrome.
The development environment in Adobe AIR is similar to other platforms. This is because it allows you to create portable applications that run in the Portable Development Environment (PDE) that runs on the MAC, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices. There are a number of similarities between the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Air as well. For example, both applications allow the playback of video and audio files, both can be accessed through a Web browser, both have support for objects, both have search tools, both have keyboard shortcuts and auto completion, both have built-in support for attachments and PDFs, both have the ability to browse and preview documents in separate tabs, and both have the "web inspector" tool that allows you to view and edit the inner workings of the PDF file.
Adobe AIR comes pre-installed with many popular web browsers. However, if you need to use other browsers, you have the option of downloading plug-ins to use other Adobe products that support the platform on different operating systems. One example is Adobe Media Server plug-in that supports the Opera browser. A plug-in that supports the Mozilla Firefox browser is also available. There are also plug-ins that support Google Chrome and the Yahoo browser.
