Reflection on Air, Papervision 3D and the evolution of technology
Air, when it came out, was like most technologies sold today: “this thing is going to be huge, it’s going to change the way we look at planet earth and it’s going to revolutionize your pants”.
It has been a year now (March 19th) that Air is in our lives (first under the name “Apollo”), and where is that big revolution?
Like any other dream, especially marketed ones, it hasn’t quite happened as they sold it. It is not huge, nor changing our bias on technology or changed anything to my pants.
It’s just a tool.
A technology, a computer, an idea is just a tool and by itself, it just sits there and will not produce anything or change the world. In other words, a technology is only as good as the adoption rate and the creativity of the people using it.
Papervision 3D, another framework, rogue, made by enthusiast, is quite a different story. People love it and the early adopters have blown our minds in term of the possibilities. Many big brands have adopted 3D in their site and are using a beta framework even though it could disappear of the earth faster than it came. Suddenly, Flash 10 promises us 3D integration (of some sort).
So why is it that something like a desktop development framework pushed by Adobe, a big software maker, can fail (I wouldn’t call that a success), while a rogue 3D framework made out of geekery makes it global and changes so much the internet?
Well, it seems that Adobe and a lot of the ‘Web2.0′ world believed that the future of the internet was to integrate the desktop with the browser and somehow get away from the browser. I’m not saying that they failed at predicting the future but they did fail at realizing it.
Is this growth only slow or is there growth at all? How has Air changed your life compared to 3D in websites? How could millions of dollar fail while geekery succeeds?
Time will tell.
The strategy department in technology companies should get closer of stabbing in the dark rather than telling people what the future is. I will always remember that t-shirt I saw recently that said: “dude, where is my flying car?”.
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5566 Says:
May 21st, 2008 at 6:34 pmAIR is a strange thing. I never understand why it should exist. We have been talking about WEB, WWW, WEB2.0 stuff all day. What was cool was that someone (google) says I brought your software (excel, word etc) onto the web. And people all “wow”. But now Adobe says, I can bring your WEB2.0 experience onto your desktop and people also “wow”ed. I’m very confused what people really want.
Matt Says:
August 28th, 2008 at 5:03 pmAIR is not a technology to “wow” the users or to make some website shiny and 3D-like. Its more of a helpful tool which allows webdevelopers to develop desktop application with their knowledge of AS, Javascript, HTML etc.
So its more of a “wow”-effekt for companys who want to jump into the desktop market but dont wanna afford expensive (or less creative *takes cover*) c++ desktop developers right away. You gotta admit that developing interfaces works much smoother with some AJAX framework or Flex in the AIR Framework than it does with Visual Studio (Blend takes things a bit further but still a but cumbersome).
So, give AIR some time, there are already a few cool apps in two dimensions. Though, a new technology is hardly like the expensive marketing says, its more about what the developers do with it.
Cheers
Nicolas Noben Says:
August 28th, 2008 at 5:22 pmMatt: I am a Flex / AIR developer myself.