The last in my little series on design matters.
Technorati tags: design, software development
Daily Archives: September 22, 2008
Adobe AIR runs on Linux
An email from Adobe alerts me to the release of AIR 1.1 for Linux beta, which I installed on my laptop which runs Ubuntu.
Installation is not quite so smooth as on Windows; you have to set execute permissions on the download before running it. It took only a moment though, and I soon had twhirl up and running, which is the only AIR application I use with any regularity.
The release notes say that all features are available except DRM. If you want transparency support, you must have a compositing manager like Beryl, Compiz or Compiz-fusion installed. You can also download a Linux SDK.
I realise that most of the world only cares about Mac and Windows clients, but I like today’s Linux desktop and kudos to Adobe for supporting it with AIR.
slotMusic: you say hello, I say goodbye
A new format called slotMusic delivers music as DRM-free MP3 files on a microSD card, with a USB adaptor so you can plug it into any PC.
Hmm, not as convenient as downloads because you have to mess around with fiddly little cards.
If I want to buy music files on a physical medium I already can; on an established format called CD, that has DRM-free files without lossy compression.
So what is the advantage of these?