At yesterday’s Ticad conference Adobe’s Mark Wheeler (MD Northern Europe) spent time in his presentation talking about Adobe Air. Mark suggested it could be used as a new Help (or document) viewer technology.
Air enables anyone to build a simple desktop application. Used a Help browser, it can integrate content residing on the PC with other content residing on the Web. User comments/annotations could be displayed at the bottom of the page. Air also offers the abilty to embed two way audio , call up an extract of a video, and include Flash files, PDFs and HTML.
Air is currently in beta and is available from labs.adobe.com
He also talked about Acrobat files that can be “turned off” should you wish users no longer to view the file.
And RoboHelp? Mark said very briefly it remains a core product, but didn’t say anything more about it.
I heard the Adobe presentation was very poor. A number of people commented about how poor the organziation of the demo was. Can you comment?
It was OK. Not great, not terrible.
The embedded 3D demo didn’t work, but software demos rarely run smoothly.
My only beef with the presentation was that it wasn’t a presentation, it was a sales demo.
That said, Air does look interesting but it did seem to be still in the realms of “can do cool stuff”. Time will tell.
Hey guys, sorry to hear the presentation wasn’t as good as it could have been. If you have any questions about AIR, feel free to drop me a note. I’m an evangelist on the platform team and it is really an interesting platform for developers.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
Scott Prentice of Leximation (and leader of the Silicon Valley DITA Users Group) developed a Help viewer with AIR a couple of months ago:
AIR Help
Scott showed it at one of our SV DITA group meetings. Pretty slick.
— James Hom