Adobe AIR format--questions

[John Hedtke]

(I posted this on the HATT list, but it occurs to me that there may 
be people who've downloaded Adobe AIR who live onTechwr-l, so let me 
pose my questions here, too.)

I downloaded the Adobe AIR add-on and installed it and poked at it 
briefly.  I've got questions I'd like to loft for anyone else who's 
tried it.  I may not have poked at it long enough--it is a Monday 
morning after all, and focusing on this has been a bit of a hassle 
with the phone calls and thrill of loading FrameMaker and Acrobat on 
a new machine in the background (more coffee!  more coffee!)--but I 
am definitely confused about the value of AIR and I wanted someone 
else's opinion, please.

After playing with it, I've got the following questions:

* I got the impression that you need to install the Java Runtime on 
any machine you want to run an Adobe AIR on.  Is this correct?  (This 
seems to be fairly unpleasant and would probably stop me right there 
from using this.  The Java Runtime and Java VM are lovely, wonderful 
programs for many things, but it's a pain in the butt to load and run 
them JUST so I can run a help application.)
* Will the Linux version be made to look and feel like the rest of 
the platforms?  (I'm getting really tired of companies saying "Hey, 
we've got a consistent look and feel... well, except for this 
operating system or this suite of products or whatever... but trust 
us, we're consistent!")
* Don't Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux already have viewers for CHM 
files that do all of the things that AIR does?
* Doesn't the MadCap Help Viewer already do all of the things AIR does?
* Didn't the Robohelp "WebHelp" cross-platform help format already do 
all of the things AIR does?

I thought commenting, breadcrumbs, and things like that were 
available in RH 7 without having to use AIR.  (MadCap Flare has them 
as well as I recollect.)  I don't have Doc-to-Help loaded so I don't 
know if it's got them or not--someone who knows D2H should please weigh in.

So what's confusing me is that I can't find any value to AIR at 
all.  We've already got all the cross-platform capabilities we could 
want with non-proprietary formats that don't require us to load a ton 
of kinda messy software, so the only reason you'd want to do this is 
if you felt like you had something that works but you wanted to fix 
it anyway.

Anyone else who's tried this, please post your thoughts.  I've 
~gotta~ be missing something here.


Yours truly,

John Hedtke
Author/Consultant/Contract Writer
www.hedtke.com <-- website
541-685-5000 (office landline)
541-554-2189 (cell)
john at hedtke.com (primary email)
johnhedtke at aol.com (secondary email)