March 13, 2008
Could Adobe Air Be The Holy Grail of Single Source Authoring?
As publishing companies struggle to COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere), single source authoring tools look more and more to be the answer.
At the end of February Adobe released Air 1.0, a new RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform. In very simple terms Air lets you develop internet applications that can be run as desktop applications regardless of wether or not you are connected to the Web. Using AJAX, Flex, ActionScript and other Web technologies, applications can be built once and with a few tweaks can be deployed both within a browser and as a desktop application.
Why could Adobe Air be the next big platform for single source authoring? Let's look at some of the benefits an Air environment could offer over traditional authoring tools and Web-based editing.
Because Adobe Air applications are installed on the desktop and are run as desktop applications, many of the things you can't do with a Web-based editing program are now possible. Local saving, drag and drop interaction with the local file system, and the ability to work offline are just a few key benefits.
While Adobe Air applications can be used on the desktop offline, they are in fact Rich Internet Applications (RIA). These new types of Internet apps offer a leg up on traditional authoring applications like Microsoft Word or Adobe InCopy in many ways.
First, with an Air application, updates can be deployed automatically, without involvement of a large IT group or reliance on users to update or download necessary patches. As more and more writers are being asked to add in Metadata, keywords and SEO friendly titles, an Air application would make it easy to constantly add fields, properties, or controlled vocabulary for users to work with.
Second, because an Air application can be directly tied in with a content management system, any user could have the ability to work offline, to save locally, and to directly post to their content management system. Of course some method of restricting publishing access would have to be involved, but this would be far easier than cutting and pasting word documents, or exporting and importing files back and forth.
At this point not many Air-based editing applications exist, but one of the early ones developed is JoomEdit, a fully featured desktop authoring tool for Joomla Content Management System content. Additionally, Adobe is planning on releasing an Air version of "BuzzWord" their online word processor program. As the Air platform gains in popularity we will start to see many more of these authoring applications. I anticipate that DPCI will begin building these applications for its clients very shortly...
For more information on Adobe Air visit: http://www.adobe.com/products/air
Posted at 08:13 pm by Ivan Mironchuk
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