10 Years...

About a week ago, I got another year older. As is typical, you find yourself reflecting from time to time about the past year. Though, while driving home one evening, I instead had a flashback to 10 years ago....

10 Years Ago

I drove an '89 Plymouth Acclaim. It had a cassette player, cloth seats, and windows that you had to roll down. I had a cd player with a tape adapter, but it never worked right with the car radio. My cellular phone had a 10-digit lcd screen and could easily fit in my briefcase and I can even connect to my ISP at about 14.4k using it. My laptop was a Compaq Pentium 100MHz with 16MB RAM and a 4X CD-ROM drive that ran Windows 95. In those days, I was building websites using HTML 4.0, VBScript, JavaScript, Perl/CGI, Server-Side Includes, and was just learning about Allaire's ColdFusion and HomeSite.

Today

I drive a '99 Jeep Grand Cherokee with powered leather seats and windows. It has an SCD player that can also play MP3's, WAV and WMA files off a CD-RW, and has an animated interactive LCD screen that shows me song titles and also heads my CD Changer, and my XM Satellite receiver.

... That's right, I said "satellite"! OK, that really is not impressive, but if I said that 10 years ago, you would not have believed me...

My cellphone today has TWO COLOR lcd screens, and I can use it to connect to the internet as fast as 1.4Mbps. My laptop now is an IBM Thinkpad 2GHz with 2GB RAM and 16x DVD-ROM/CD-RW running Windows XP SP2 and Ubuntu. And, I could not even begin to list all the tools I use these days without forgetting something.


Ten Years From Now

I guess I will be driving an '09 American Something that has power doors, remote climate control, GPS, complete media center that plays DVD's and can stream other media from my home server.

My cell phone will be more of a portable access device that also streams multimedia, surfs the web, has a 20Mbps connection in some places and can interact seamlessly with my computers and car.

My laptop will most likely have some cool bi-fold or tri-fold screen, a 1THz processor, 40GB Ram, HD-DVD-RW that multi-boots in several OS's.

And, who knows why I will need it?

AIR: Adobe Integrated Runtime

AIR: Adobe Integrated Runtime

Some products have already pownced on this still-beta framework. And, I think with good reason. AIR can utilize any mix of HTML / JavaScript / Ajax / Flash / Flex development resources in order to deliver cross-OS desktop applications.

AIR has similarities to XULRunner. AIR is a runtime, like Java J2RE that needs to be installed onto the client's machine. The difference here is that while Mozilla and Sun may be household names to any geek with a computer, they still don't have quite the same name recognition that Adobe has with "normal" users due to their products (Flash and Acrobat). So the potential adoption curve of AIR is far greater.

AIR is beautiful. Flash content means superior anti-aliasing, and makes it far easier to animate your application. Even the installer is pretty.

If AIR gets even a quarter of the traction that Flash or Adobe gets, AIR is going to be very attractive, very fast. At that point, I see a lot of incentive for fat-client web applications to port their application if for no other reason than to eliminate the many, many pains of cross-browser support.