As the web evolves, businesses need to differentiate themselves if they are to succeed in a world overwhelmed with information.

According to a recent Gartner research survey, companies that emphasise and focus on user experience(UX) as a strategic objective traditionally enjoy up to a 60% higher profitability and are twice as likely to exceed analyst expectations. In-line with Gartner's recommendation, organisations now have a new and innovative tool at their disposal that greatly enhances the UX of customers interacting with their web applications - the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Adobe AIR opens up the desktop as a new deployment environment for rich internet applications (RIA) built using Flash, Flex, HTML or AJAX. Adobe AIR allows web developers to take applications (traditionally confined to the browser) and leverage native desktop integration, including clipboard and drag-and-drop support, local file IO, system notification, and more.

The Business of AIR

Companies such as eBay , Salesforce.com , Nickelodeon and NASDAQ have already recognised the benefits of offering their users an enhanced desktop experience, in conjunction with their existing web offerings. Using Adobe AIR they are not only differentiating themselves from their competition, but are maximizing their ROI for the initial outlay on development. And closer to home, the local Adobe office is already working with companies in the banking sector to develop AIR applications.

The NASDAQ product development team for example, turned to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR to create NASDAQ Market Replay. This dynamic application gives users instant insight into extremely detailed trading activity in the stockmarket at any time during the day. The application enables brokers to show their customers exactly what was going on in the market at the time a trade happened, helping them understand why they received a particular price.

One of the tangible benefits of leveraging Adobe AIR with the NASDAQ Market Replay application is that it minimises bandwidth demands for the large data-sets used. Once users have the trading data on their desktop, they can control and view it in a variety ways. For example, a power user—such as a trader—responsible for watching a certain stock might set the Adobe AIR application to run overnight to be assured that all the data needed is ready instantly to replay the day's activity—without tying up an Internet connection during business hours.

Another advantage of using Adobe AIR is the ability to maximise ROI for the initial outlay costs of development. Being able to develop once, and deploy twice (for web and desktop), with only minor code tweaks, represents a significant cost benefit. When Model Metrics released their on-demand Adobe AIR application for the pharmaceutical industry, on Force.com, it represented the first multi-tenant “Platform as a Service” from Salesforce.com.

One of Adobe AIR's main value propositions for Model Metrics was its network detection feature. Being able to integrate “network awareness” into the application enabled mobile pharmaceutical representatives to synchronise field information with large data sets before and after visiting physician offices.

According to Adam Caplan, President of Model Metrics, the key benefit of their Adobe AIR application is its ability to capture data in both online and offline environments and then deliver that data automatically to backend systems. Caplan goes on to say that “At the end of the day, it's about sales reps spending less time manually capturing information and more time working with physicians - and Adobe AIR is enabling this”.

Browser Limitations

Browser applications have a restricted form factor, size, and footprint. Consisting, for the most part, of a square window border, and pre-defined menu buttons/bars. Added to this, traditional browser based applications greatly restrict UI creative expression and offer a poor user-experience when compared with rich client capabilities available in modern operating systems such as Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows Vista.

Another disadvantage of the browser is that security restrictions often limit application functionality. For as long as the web has existed, browsers have always been a security weak-link. As a result, the efforts in tightening browser security have resulted in limitations that end up preventing intuitive user gestures such as drag-and-drop between client applications as well as interfering in other ways with RIAs. Combined with this, limited access to local resources, such as user preference settings or locally stored data, also reduces what a developer can do on the desktop side of a browser-based RIA.

Finally, browsers have extremely limited offline usage. In some cases, browser based applications can rely on cached images and html, but for the most-part, browser-based applications are useless when the user is disconnected from the web. Thankfully for both business and end-users, all of the above limitations are a thing of the past, when developers choose to leverage Adobe AIR in porting their browser-based applications to the desktop. Additionally, because developers can use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop, there's no need for cross/up-skill training in new technologies.

Adobe AIR has the potential to take Web 2.0, and the web as a platform to the next level by making the desktop environment more accessible to web developers. Adobe AIR allows you to enter the era of the Web-Enabled Desktop Development.