Ext JS and Adobe AIR
As we’ve been exploring ways to take Bespin to the desktop, we’ve looked closely at some of the single-site browser technologies and their individual APIs to work out which platform we favor. As we went through this exercise, Adobe AIR really impressed us with the richness of its JavaScript APIs which wrap native APIs (as well as the accompanying documentation).
There’s no other competing JavaScript API that we’ve seen that comes close to this level of comprehensiveness (please correct us in the comments in we’re wrong).
We weren’t able to use AIR as its implementation of <canvas> is a bit old, but we’re excited to play with it as soon as we can.
Ext JS and Pixel Bender Explorer
We’re not the only ones who have been playing with AIR. Aaron Conran from the Ext JS crew blogged about Pixel Bender Explorer , an AIR app they wrote to demonstrate how to integrate Ext JS with AIR’s Pixel Bender technology that lets you apply pretty amazing effects to interfaces.
Pixel Bender can spruce up an Ext.air application by adding custom animations to wow your users. However, you should be cautious about the over-use of these filters throughout your application. For a good example of how effective these filters and animations can be to provide proper user feedback you should check Adobe’s signature sample BlackBookSafe. Each time an animation occurs it is clear why it happened, not a surprise to the user and adds character to the application. When using these animations you should strive for the same goal, not to surprise your user, but to impress them.
