Wayne D's Blog

When I saw that Adobe had not released a Linux version of Adobe AIR I thought some nasty things about Adobe. Adobe's FAQ from mid December said they were planning for Linux support but I got a bit cynical when March came and nothing had appeared, especially when I was trying to find a twitter client and many of them were designed for AIR. Well on March 30th, Adobe released their Alpha Linux AIR runtime. They are targeting and promising simultaneous Windows, Mac OS and Linux release for AIR 1.1. I loaded up AIR and tried Twirl, an AIR Twitter client. All was well until I changed workspaces and Twirl disappeared. It was still running as it would pop up notifications of new tweets but the main application window had disappeared. (updated June 16th) As of Twirl version 0.8.2 this problem has been resolved and Twirl works fine. Looks like it wasn't an Adobe issue after all. I don't know whether to blame AIR or Twirl but I'm sure it will get worked out before AIR gets released for real. Adobe is embracing Linux and has joined the Linux foundation because I think in part machines like the eeepc have demonstrated that big computing isn't necessarily the way to go. Ubiquitous wireless is enabling internet based applications. My eeepc has 512M of memory and can handle pretty much anything I want to do it. Microsoft's recent announcement that they are extending the life of Windows XP may in part be a result of their realization that they need a light version of Windows that can be run on less powerful portable hardware.

Here is a challenge for Adobe, give me Photoshop on Linux because I can't convince the people I work with to use Gimp. When you do release Photoshop for Windows offer me a free license transfer to Linux because I can't justify buying the same software twice.

I also recently tried out Twingly, a European based blog search tool. Though I have had issues with Google in the past, they seem to like me now. My article on adobe flash eeepc support was indexed by Google thirty-nine minutes after I posted it. Twingly is still in private beta, so my expectations weren't that high. First thing I tried was searching for the title of my latest blog post, nope, but that wasn't that surprising. The I tried searching for Dvorak,the man who plugs his blog relentlessly, nope on his blog too. Searching for Robert Scoble brings up TechCrunch but not Scoble's own blog. I realize that these guys are all American but the web is about finding information wherever it is. When I signed up I pinged my blog to see if they would index it, no new spider has appeared in my logs, I guess my blog isn't significant enough to be indexed. Google has a worldwide presence because even with all the link farms they have worked hard to stay relevant. Knocking them off their perch is not going to be easy.