Beta Available: Adobe AIR 1.1 for Linux

Having used Linux as my primary desktop for over ten years I can’t help but be a bit jealous of all the great software Windows and Mac users have available to them. But I can’t really blame the software creators for focusing on only those platforms. It’s just purely economics. The cost / benefit of making software work on Linux just isn’t there for most consumer software. What we have always dreamed of is “Write Once, Run Anywhere”. Why can’t software developers write applications for one OS and have it run on all of them?

Adobe Systems has been making great progress turning the dream of consistent, ubiquitous, and cross-platform software run times into reality. This is one of the many reasons I am excited about what Adobe is doing with their software platform technologies and I am happy to be a Technical Evangelist for them. The Flash Player releases have been sim-shipping on all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) for almost a year now. But the recent addition to the platform stack, Adobe AIR, is still lagging a bit behind on Linux. Today Adobe posted a beta build of Adobe AIR 1.1 for Linux on the labs.adobe.com site. We all hope that soon even the AIR releases will sim-ship on all three major operating systems. But until then, go download this beta, give it a try and let Adobe know how it works for you.