Julie Campagna, Managing Editor for the Adobe Edge Newsletter, joined the on AIR team out behind our San Francisco office in the early morning just before we took off for our first gig in Seattle. In this video for the July/August edition of the Edge newsletter, Julie interviews Adobe’s RIA Evangelist, Ryan Stewart, for background on the tour and a tour of the on AIR bus.

Check it out here.

I’ve had a lot of requests to post the slides from my keynote at our AIR Camp events during the on AIR Bus Tour. I went ahead and posted them here in PDF form. Let me know if you have any questions.

Download here

As of 6:20pm Dallas time on July 18, Colin Moock’s latest book, “Essential ActionScript 3.0” is number four on Amazon’s best-seller list. Tim O’Reilly hasn’t confirmed this on his blog yet, like he did with “Programming Flex 2″ by Chafic Kazoun and Joey Lott, but I am hearing rumors that Colin’s book may be trending towards an all-time best-seller for O’Reilly. Awesome.

This supports a trend that we’ve been seeing. Flex is hot - ActionScript 3.0 is hot, and Adobe AIR is bringing whole new crowds of web developers over to check out Flex, Flash, and ActionScript 3.0.

By the way, thanks to Colin for mentioning my name in the beginning of the book. It’s pretty cool to see your name printed in a best-selling book.

Congratulations, Colin! I know writing this book was a ton of work but it will surely be the one book that every ActionScript developer will want to have on their desks. Great work.

Check out this new iPhone JavaScript library, iUI, by Joe Hewitt. The team at Digg has already put this into practice, releasing a beta of an iPhone-optimized version of digg.com. You can view this at digg.com/iphone. If you don’t have an iPhone but want to get a virtual iPhone browsing experience, download iPhoney (mac only).

iUI is about more than just visuals, it aims to make web apps as usable as Apple’s own. One usability problem I kept witnessing in early iPhone web apps was a lack of support for the back button. While using these apps I often found myself hitting back and being sent two or three “pages” backwards. The reason is that most apps are using single-page navigation, which skirts the browser’s own history. The single-page model is the right way to go, but it is imperative that the back button still works, because if I’m going to wait 3 minutes to load a page over EDGE and then have to load it again because the back button accidentally sent me away from your site, I’m not going to be happy.

That’s why I think the best feature of iUI is that it makes single-page navigation usable. It keeps the back and forward buttons working and optionally inserts a captioned back button into your app’s toolbar. It slides smoothly between pages (at least as smoothly as Safari can go, which is about 1/10th as smooth as native apps) instead of the unpleasant flicker and jumpiness that accompanies a fresh page load.

Update: In the comments Sam reminded me that Sun’s JavaFX is a player in the RIA space. I meant to include Sun it but forgot. I’ve updated the post below.

Almost every day I’m reminded that very few people understand that Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin competes directly with the Flash Player, not Adobe AIR - or the fact that Silverlight is no where near the same thing as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). So I thought I’d try to add some high-level clarity on which technologies compete with which technologies. I’ll start with the programming languages.

Primary Languages
Adobe: ActionScript 3.0, MXML (Adobe AIR also supports JavaScript and HTML)
Microsoft: C#, XAML (you can also use other languages in conjunction with their Dynamic Language Runtime ‘DLR’)
Sun: Java
Ajax: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML

Frameworks, Libraries, and APIs
Adobe: Flex framework
Microsoft: .NET
Sun: J2EE, JavaFX
Ajax: Too many to name here. Prototype, Dojo, JQuery, YUI, are among the most popular.

Browser-based Rich Client Runtime (plugin)
Adobe: Flash Player
Microsoft: Silverlight (formerly codenamed WPF/e)
Sun: Java Runtime Environment (JRE)
*Google: Google Gears (a browser plugin that allows browser-based web apps to run offline, whis is something kind of in the middle between Flash Player and Adobe AIR)

Desktop Runtime (note: Microsoft’s WPF isn’t exactly a “desktop runtime” but that’s the only generic way I can describe it. It’s more of an integral component of Windows)
Adobe: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)
Microsoft: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
Sun: Java Runtime Environment (JRE)

Development Environment
Adobe: Flex Builder (Eclipse-based)
Microsoft: Visual Studio
Sun: Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilder, etc. (not Sun products)
Ajax: Text editors, Eclipse, Aptana (Eclipse plugin), Dreamweaver

You can argue that some of these things compete indirectly but I’m comparing these based on capabilities and what they’re used for. I hope this helps clarify things for some of you.