MORI57  I'm no Microsoft apologist, but you -do- realize that you're eschewing a product that offers possibly the ONLY serious commercial competition to Adobe?

Does anyone here keep track of software prices, or see how dangerous it is to have the most prevalent tools in the industry all owned by one company? Adobe owns imaging, desktop publishing, and web publishing tools that have no seriously-credible competitors.

I'm not trying to discount apps such as GIMP, RapidWeaver, or their kin ... I own TextMate and Cyberduck for most of my general editing purposes ... more power to the small players, but I doubt any of them would seriously contend that they play on equal footing within the same mass market that "Macrodobia" now owns.

Now, Microsoft's tools have all the stamps of Microsoft's previous attempts to get a foot in the door. I probably won't buy any of them. I'm born, bred, and raised on Adobe products. Still, the higher Adobe raises the prices for Dreamweaver and Flash, the more often I start looking for lower-priced alternatives. If Microsoft offered Silverlight editing tools on the Mac that were decently priced, I would be tempted to give it a shot.

Be careful that you don't discount Microsoft's efforts. If Adobe is not cautious, and believes it can bilk its developers because it's the only game in town, Microsoft could end up surprising them.  
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MORI57  For those of you too busy to do more than make snide comments about a product you haven't bothered reading even the simplest introductory article on (many readily available from Adobe's wiki), I thought I'd take a few minutes out of my own busy schedule:

1) AIR (formerly "Apollo") is to the desktop what Flash Player is to the web browser. That is, you write content for AIR, compile it, and then people can download it and run it like a regular desktop application. And, yes, this means that you now have access to desktop-side faculties, such as the filesystem.

2) One chief difference between AIR and other dev tools is that you can use a mixture of HTML, XML, Javascript, Actionscript, Flex, etc. You're not limited to the script libraries that Adobe provides, either. Jack Slocum's Ext library, for example, is used to create a really nifty looking Task tracking app.

3) Adobe's purpose is to create an application development platform that allows the huge community of web developers use of their already-existing skills for desktop development. A secondary purpose, of course, is to allow web apps to be brought to the desktop for offline-enabled apps... apps that update when you're connected, but are still usable (in a limited sense, like composing email using Mail offline) when you're not.

4) The fact that Adobe has put more effort into bringing this technology out in a beta form shows more interest in creating a grassroots community. Branding can come later; the hardest part is getting developers interested in using the tools.

5) AIR is cross-platform. There is a runtime for Mac and for Windows, and I'm certain that if the Linux community gets pushing, there will be one for them as well.

6) Not only that, but Aptana has plug-ins that allow you to develop HTML/Javascript based AIR apps, for free, at the moment. Whether that will stay that way, I haven't heard, but you can at least give it a try.  
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