Until yesterday most of my Adobe AIR experimentation had been with Flash and a tiny bit with Flex.

Yesterday I started working with the AIR SDK and playing around with some html AIR apps.

I was happy to find that both iframes and cookies work in AIR. Apparently since AIR uses the Safari WebKit for its browsing engine, anything that would work in WebKit will work in AIR. I even found a couple Adobe posts referencing the use of iframes and cookies so I’ve decided it’s not poor practice.

It seemed almost too easy though. I mean with an iframe you could pull almost anything (cf, php, asp) into your AIR app. Add cookies to the mix (NPI) and you could store data from your app online for later use. It can’t be that simple can it?

Adobe has always touted the benefit of AIR as being able to “use your existing web development skills to create desktop apps”. But for some reason I just thought there would be a catch. I figured you’d have to know some Flex or have some mad JS skills to make anything really cool. But with this new discovery, my mind is racing as to all the cool things that could be done. I don’t even need to learn MXML or figure out how to work with the MySQL lite db that can run inside an AIR app. Sure picking up those skills won’t hurt, but I can actually use my EXISTING skills to build an app!

And that, my friends, is why AIR rocks like nothing else out there. Stay tuned for some Harding AIR apps.