iPlayer Released for Mac, Linux; Adobe Announces AIR for Linux

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 18, 2008 @10:03AM from the rich-buttery-web-apps dept.

Zoxed writes "The BBC reports that their iPlayer has just been released for Mac and Linux (download page). It is based on Adobe Air, but unfortunately the service is only available to UK IP address, so I can not test it out from my adopted homeland of Germany. Perhaps a UK-based Slashdotter could review it?" In related news, an anonymous reader writes "Adobe has announced a Linux version of its AIR 1.5 runtime environment that is supposed to allow rich web apps developed on it to run on Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7.10 and openSuse 10.3 with no modification. The company released versions for Windows and Mac OS X back in November."

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Re:potential of Air ? by Toonol · 2008-12-18 10:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

Actionscript 3.0 is really a pretty decent language, on par with the newest versions of javascript... and DHTML/CSS doesn't come close to the power of the flash graphics API. A decent flash game, for instance, can look & play better than most Super Nintendo games; DHTML/Javascript is still pushing hard to look like an original NES. Both, of course, are hundreds of times slower than native applications.

Flash has its problems, obviously; it breaks the whole browsing paradigm. However, there's just nothing else out there right now with the same mix of capabilities; it has its niche. (Maybe java applets, but those universally suck. Maybe Silverlight could, but nobody seriously uses it.)