If you’re reading this blog by feed, you probably saw John’s post already, which was re-posted here by a snafu with one of our plugins.
I had planned to blog this anyway, but to be clear and give credit where it’s due, John Sim built a WebCenter AIR app, not anyone on our team.
As he mentions in his post, John has been lobbying us to build an AIR app in conjunction with the other tools we’ve built, the bookmarklet and Chrome extension.
I looked at AIR about 18 months ago when we were looking for ways to extend Connect to the desktop, and at the time, it required Flex, something I have no good reason to learn.
Apparently, AIR supports CSS3 and HTML5 via WebKit, which is what John used to build his quick AIR app. So, you can circumvent the annoyance of learning Flex and take advantage of the cross-OS support that AIR provides.
I’m still not totally convinced this is something we want to invest in, mainly because AIR is pretty cavalier with system resources, which is why I abandoned TweetDeck in favor of native Mac apps like Nambu and Tweetie.
But, I’m open to consider it. If John makes it to OpenWorld this year, we should set up a hackathon so he, Rich, Anthony and anyone else interested can work on this and other WebCenter projects.
Anyway, check out his demo of the People Connections REST API at work in an AIR app.
Nice work John, enjoy your holiday.
