Having been at a Web 2.0 conference for a chunk of the week, I figured I’d finally download an try Adobe AIR, as they announced a Linux version last week at the Linux Collaboration Summit. I am massively underwhelmed.

First off, only 1 of the top 6 air apps on their site actually run on the Linux build of AIR. That app, an rss reader, which is basically a clone of Liferea, but not noticeably better in any way.

Secondly, transparency doesn’t work. I installed the Screenboard app and the Ruler app, both of which we useless as they didn’t do alpha channel.

Thirdly, their AIR app installer makes a new Gnome application menu for Air Examples each time it installs an application. So I now have 3 Air Examples folders in my application menu, each with 1 application in them.

Finally, air fonts seem to be hard coded to something smaller than my desktop settings, with no clear way to scale them up. Any application framework that doesn’t respect my system font settings is pretty useless to me.

Hopefully a lot of these get fixed in the near future. The only thing that AIR seemed to do was a lot of animated menus, which are pretty, but not actually useful. Perhaps if the alpha layer stuff had worked, I’d be a bit more impressed, but without that all the demo apps seem pretty pointless right now. And the one app that I might actually care about, TwittAir, uses functions the Linux AIR runtime doesn’t have yet.