I don’t usually get excited about Adobe products. They’re either restrictively expensive or horrible little scourges of the Web. Which is why I let news of Adobe AIR fly right by. I appreciate what I think they are trying to do. It’s certainly nice having a development platform accessible to the three major desktop operating systems. The few applications I’ve read about looked pretty slick.
In my never-ending quest for the perfect Twitter client, I installed AIR to check out the Spaz Twitter client. I tried it first on XP (work machine), and it’s very nice. Slick, but it is an early version and there are some little bugs here and there. AIR is still in beta for Linux and installed fine on this notebook running Ubuntu 8.04. AIR was nice enough to make sure that Firefox knew how to handle AIR application installs from the web, so Spaz was painless to install.
The AIR installer defaulted to ‘/opt/spaz’, which would have been okay except that it wasn’t initialized by a process that would give the installer root privileges, so I changed it to ‘/home/user/Programs/’ where I keep programs I install myself. Also, the fonts were not nearly as sharp as they were on XP. It was not affected by the sub-pixel hinting enabled by the desktop environment (the picture below was smoothed a bit from the jpg conversion, so it doesn’t look as bad). It may be looking specifically for Microsoft fonts, found in the ‘msttcorefonts’ package, which is not installed as web pages will use those instead of the lovely fonts installed by default. Also, the Spaz client took up ~30MB of memory, roughly the same as the Firefox instance that was running at the time.
I may use Spaz at home on my desktop, but it certainly isn’t ideal for this notebook due to memory limitations (a too-often recurring theme).
Spaz Twitter client under Ubuntu Hardy