After half a year of beta releases the first real version of AIR is available. For everybody who has never heard of AIR this is the Adobe marketing talk:

The AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.

With proven web technologies Adobe means Flash, Flex and HTML. The nice thing about this is that you can make a full-blown desktop application with the knowledge you already have. You don’t have to learn C# or JAVA. The downside of AIR, in my opinion, is that a user needs to install the AIR Runtime. You can’t include this in your application installer. I couldnt’t find any further information about this, but in the FAQ the following is said:

If you have created CD or intranet content that depends on Adobe AIR, you can distribute the players via CD or intranet so your users won’t have to download them from the Internet.

I made some applications and so far for me it works just fine. I just converted some of my flash projects to a real application without any problem.

Below is the poster they made for the release (I like it!)

Resources:
* Official AIR site
* Adobe’s showcase of AIR applications