I love Flex so much, I have actually been skeptical about Adobe AIR. Over the last year, I have had a hard time understanding why moving applications from the Web to the Desktop mattered (it just didn’t seem that interesting).
Then I had the chance to attend the Adobe Engage event two weeks ago,
where they launched Adobe AIR with its 1.0 release. With the launch, they demonstrated a number of applications built using the AIR platform.

For personally, it was one of those exciting,
yet horrifying moments in life. It was horrifying because I started to understand how limited my personal development experience has been by only knowing a world where the browser/Internet exists. I have been in the software industry for 10 years – so for me it has always been about web based applications.
There have only been two times in my career that have I been asked to build a non-web / desktop application, compared to dozens of requests for web UI’s.

So, even though it was a bit frightening to realize how limited my view of user interface development has been, it was exciting to begin to understand what is now possible as the web and the desktop blend with platforms like Adobe AIR. There were a number of cool applications / features demonstrated. One of the coolest applications was Sprout, for assembling content from anywhere.

Most all of the applications demonstrated were amazing, but much of my optimism and excitement comes from many of the subtle features in these applications enabled by the AIR platform.
Seeing a Flex application in the browser communicating with an AIR application on the desktop is just cool, and will help us (developers) to implement features that improve user experience.