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Comment by ronadams | Hacker News Reader

We're using Adobe Air/HTML5/Jquery/Backbone.js/CSS.

You're shackling yourselves to a platform from a vendor widely known for bloated and buggy products. You can expect the strangest and most bizarre bugs ever. Here's an example from today: I updated flash to its latest version and now youtube videos have their red and blue channel swapped. But only when using hardware video acceleration. Or how about Machinarium - it's also based on flash and is unplayably slow, but only when run fullscreen. When run in a window, it's perfect.

You should really sit back and think hard whether you can replace Air with something like python+qt+... or perhaps java (well, the jvm+libraries, you can still write in jython or clojure or whatever's hot these days). I'm sure there must be a platform to suit your needs that isn't Air.

In the short term, Adobe Air provides you with the shortest time to get you product to market, but I agree that it should/cannot be a longterm solution, anything short of writing you app in native code IMHO is making yourself held hostage to these runtime environments and their quirks.

At work we use one of your competitors, HipChat. They also have supposed Linux support via Adobe Air. Air just flat won't work with 64-bit Ubuntu(1). There are mystical voodoo rituals documented by lay practitioners (with names like UbutnuFan2732) which, surprisingly, don't work. The truth is that Adobe doesn't support it, so if you're lucky enough to get an Air App running on Linux it probably won't last.

(1) I would imagine 64-bit Ubuntu is not rare. What are you Air app developers testing on?

Hopefully you'll consider switching to Titanium Desktop.

There are many reasons, but the most important one is supporting Linux, since Adobe killed Air for Linux.

Thanks for the tip. We did consider Titanium but heard from several startups stories about Titanium being very hard to debug.

You're doomed

Politely: I won't install an Adobe Air app unless forced to by me employer. Maybe that's how this will work, but Air is always a drag in my personal experience.

Again, it would be great to get feedback on exactly why it's a drag.

Because it's Yet Another Runtime that I Don't Want to Have to Install and Maintain.

I have yet to see an AIR application that is truly cross-platform functional. They run, but that doesn't mean that I want to spend time in them.

I hadn't heard of hall.com before this post, but while I appreciate that (a) you've done this out of response to your users (good) and (b) you've done this because it's faster than doing something else, (c) I don't install AIR.

These days, I only want .apps that include everything I need inside of the app bundle and don't require external installations. (I say this as someone shipping a USB stick with an app that, to apply an update of the app on the stick from the Mac, you have to have a driver installed. I don't want that driver, but I have to. Can't stand it.)

Excellent! Thanks for the feedback. That's the type of useful information we need.

Why don't you give them real feedback? This site thrives on collaboration not "one-liners" like what you provided.

@sohn, care to elaborate?

y? do tell

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