We are spoiled!

I made my first AIR app at Arlanda airport today. Nothing fancy, but it struck me how spoiled we as Flash / Flex developers are. I’ve never really needed a standalone cross platform application until today and now I just made one while sipping coffee and waiting for my flight. It didn’t require me to learn anything new, I just sat down and made it in about one hour.

I’ve done several projector-based applications before, but they’ve mostly been for either PC or Mac. A few have been both, but those have been a real hassle and the APIs have been awkward. The thing with Flash (and now AIR) applications is that we just expect them to work flawlessly across platforms - and they do. Across Mac, PC and Linux they look the same and just do their job. Not only that, they are also powerful, easy to code and deploy. We take this all for granted, but this is really an amazing feat of engineering!

At the Stockholm OnAIR event I was talking to some former Java devs. They apparently didn’t know much about Flex or Actionscript until they were required to learn it at work and they felt a new world open to them as they discovered what they could do. RAD suddenly was fast as in like really fast (compared to Java/HTML/Portals).

Being a Flash/Flex developer isn’t hassle free, but I have a feeling we have a little less to worry about other developers. Don’t we?