Kuler Gets Cooler
Abraham Maslow famously said that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Closer to home, it would seem that for Adobe Systems, every web site is starting to look like an application. We're further and further away from the company's early 80s origins, based on the brilliant PostScript page description language developed by founders Warnock and Geske. But who can blame Adobe? There's an undeniable attraction to playing in the big leagues of application development, along with Microsoft and Google.
Things have been moving in this direction for some time, with the arc of Flash increasingly tied to the realm of developers. Adobe's recent release of Flex 3 and AIR simply made official what has been clear for some time—that Adobe sees itself as the future development platform of choice for both web and desktop apps. If you haven't already got the Flex/AIR religion, you owe it to yourself to check it out, since this will increasingly be dominating the world of web site creators, who now find themselves able to make the jump to creating desktop applications. Where a site ends and an application begins may soon be a moot point.
Adobe AIR lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Flash and Flex to create applications for the desktop that work with local or server data. Adobe AIR (this is the backwards version of the acronym for Rich Internet Application. Okay, it's not worthy of Oscar Wilde, but it's not bad!) and the Adobe AIR SDK are available as free downloads for both Mac and Windows. Showing they can walk the walk, Adobe has been busy converting key projects in its popular Labs venture to AIR applications, as well as acquiring third-party ones, notably the Buzzword online word processor. Of its own creations, Adobe Media Player is certainly worth a look, as is Kuler.
Kuler has been around for a while in its web-based, Flash-driven incarnation but has now made the leap to the status of AIR desktop application. It retains its core functionality as a mechanism for participants to create and share color schemes for use in Creative Suite 2 and 3 but as a "real" application, themes can now be dragged and dropped to the desktop as transparent, scalable "tear offs." There's less and less need to actually visit an old-fashioned "web site" (remember those?). It's all good fun, of course, and in the name of progress we can only concur. Golden hammer? You decide.
Chris Dickman
Graphics.com
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