Posted 11/17/09 at 02:16:51 PM by Bart Salisbury

It’s not just the season for giving thanks, it’s apparently the season for coughing up betas. Yesterday Microsoft released the Office 2010 beta to developers (and to regular users on November 18). Today Adobe has announced beta versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

AIR allows developers to create Internet applications that run outside a browser on a variety of operating systems. Flash provides multimedia content within a browser, again on various operating systems. Both beta versions will offer global error handling (a benefit for developers), local microphone access, and, should you be blessed with a touch screen, support for multi-touch and gestures. Flash will also incorporate the latest hardware decoding of H.264 on Windows PCs. While AIR will add communication with native applications on the local machine; mass storage detection; an open document API; a faster JavaScript engine; and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities.

The betas for Flash Player and AIR are available now for Windows, OS X, and Linux, as well as x86-based netbooks.

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Posted 09/21/09 at 12:30:00 PM by David Murphy

Do you hate Adobe AIR? I sometimes do. While the applications based on Adobe's framework can be pretty neat to use, there's something about their similar look and shared frameworks, not to mention features, that just can just drive me up the wall. Plus, every new Adobe AIR-based application has to be installed and run through Adobe AIR itself. While it's a handy way to make sure that you're running the most up-to-date version of the application, the Adobe AIR platform isn't very conducive to portable use. Actually, you can't stick AIR-based applications on a USB key and run them at all--the host computer would still need Adobe AIR for these apps to function.

That's but one minor complaint about the AIR platform. There are more, but this week's freeware roundup isn't intended to be a slam on these Adobe apps. Rather, I'll be taking a look at some of Adobe AIR's more popular applications and offering up unique freeware alternatives that don't require use of the AIR platform to work. Not all of the listed applications will support portable use out-of-the-box, but you can use the popular Mojopac Free program to store and access all of these apps on any USB device of your choosing.

Put your trigger-finger on the uninstaller button for Adobe AIR, then click the jump!

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Posted 02/12/09 at 01:30:00 PM by David Murphy

Novell's Mono Project released version 1.0 of Moonlight today, an open-source platform that allows Linux users to view Microsoft Silverlight-based content and applications.  Delivered as a Firefox extension, Moonlight comes alongside the release of the Microsoft Media Pack, a Firefox extension that gives Linux users access to Microsoft-endorsed media codecs. This opens up the door for playing all Silverlight-compatible media (including MP3, WMA, and WMV files).  According to Novel, Moonlight should work with all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

But if you think that this is going to put a dent in Adobe Air's market share, you're in for a treat.  Click the jump to see just how much Adobe's runtime environment is winning the platform war against Microsoft's Silverlight!

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Posted 06/23/08 at 07:16:04 PM by Will Smith

Without a doubt, the MacBook Air is one of the niftiest-looking laptops we've ever tested.  But he smallest notebook we’ve ever tested comes with sacrifices - the MacBook Air makes serious compromises to maintain its petite profile.

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