Adobe buzzword air

Adobe recently acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the creators of Buzzword - a web based word processor. Coletta and Staley provided InfoQ. Buzzword looks and behaves like a normal word processor but it operates inside a web browser. It combines the rich user experience of desktop word processors with the ubiquitous access and collaboration capability of other web based word processors.

No other online word processor can approximate the rich experience, because they are constrained by the limitations of HTML and JavaScript. This includes meticulous letter spacing and complete repagination of the document with each keystroke - instantaneously.

Buzzword also offers easy and powerful image manipulation within the document, including drag and drop for placement and resizing. The significant performance improvement in Flash Player 9 made this approach feasible. Buzzword is available free for public use at www. At that time, Flex 2. Our must-haves were ubiquity i. None of the platforms we considered could meet this high bar, and we thought maybe what we were trying to do was impossible.

When the first beta releases of Flex 2. Next, Coletta and Staley were asked about the challenges encountered developing Buzzword using Flex: We have encountered and mostly overcome quite a few challenges.

Here are a few examples. Using JavaScript constrains the number of browsers we can support, makes it difficult for us to keep up with point-releases to the browsers we do support, and generally compromises Flash's promise of ubiquity. Furthermore, the hosting browser's toolbars and menu bar compete for screen real estate, and take away from Buzzword's streamlined approach to editing. Fortunately, the Adobe AIR platform will allow us to overcome the constraints of living inside the browser, by providing direct access to keyboard events and the system clipboard, and giving us full control over window chrome.

Another technical challenge is keeping Buzzword's user interface responsive without the use of background threads. ActionScript 3, the programming language used in Flex development, is fundamentally single-threaded, and requires asynchronous completion functions for all network operations.

Performing time-consuming background operations on a separate thread is a common technique for maintaining responsiveness in a user interface, and since we can't do that, we have to resort to alternative techniques which are sometimes clumsy and difficult to implement and maintain. But multithreaded programming is notoriously hard to do correctly, so this limitation is not without a silver lining.

On the design front, it has been challenging to find the right balance between simplicity and judicious use of visual effects. Flash and Flex provide a very rich palette of animation and transition choices, and once animation is introduced into one area of an application's user interface, it becomes necessary to consider how to use visuals effectively throughout the application.

Similarly, we have been able to innovate in a few key areas of interface design, such as Buzzword's formatting toolbar, document scroll bar, and collaborator bar, while working hard to strike the right balance between visual innovation and consistency. One thing that would be useful and realistic to ask for is a facility for compiling and running ActionScript code at runtime. Not a single member of the Buzzword team had ever worked in Flash or Flex before starting on Buzzword.

Set the file permissions so that the installer application can be executed. From a command line, you can set the file permissions with:. Some versions of Linux allow you to set the file permissions on the Properties dialog opened through a context menu. Adobe AIR is installed as a native package.

In other words, as rpm on an rpm based distribution and deb on a Debian distribution. Currently AIR does not support any other package format. Using the package installers:. Faisal Abid Faisal Abid 8, 14 14 gold badges 54 54 silver badges 90 90 bronze badges. Prem Rajendran Prem Rajendran 2 2 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 21 21 bronze badges.

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