Dion and I are at Adobe’s Engage 2008 event to talk about the present and future of the AIR platform. I’ve skipped blogging the intro by Adobe’s CEO and CTO; I’ll go back and cover some of that.
Two guys from the New York Times are on stage talking about Shifd at the moment. Shifd.com, a website and an AIR application written by two folks in the New York Times “R&D lab.” The concept is a way of “shifting” content from the desktop to mobile and back again. It started as a hack that won a contest a year ago and is now a beta application.
The idea is that you can store three types of snippets: notes, links, and places. You can store them via a web (HTML) interface, an AIR interface, or sending SMS messages. They also have a nice iPhone HTML version of the HTML interface. So, if you add a note via the web interface, it’s available via the other interfaces.
Dion leaned over and whispered, “Or, you could write the address down on a piece of paper, email it to yourself, etc.” Yeah, good point.
The AIR version of the app lets you turn any of the individual snippets into desktop widgets (as in floating windows, not Dashboard widgets) that save the data when you edit them and works off-line. The AIR version uses the HTML model of AIR–it was written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, not the Flash stuff. Cool.
Ben Galbraith 
Piece of paper?….Sure. Then, once you’ve written down the number on a gum wrapper, you can sniff out of few quarters and walk down a couple of long blocks to a pay phone. Great plan. You can also keep track of your phone-calling budget by tallying up the amounts on your Abacus.
Dion, embrace Shifd. You know you love it!