Adobe AIR and real Ajax advantage

When originally confronted with Adobe AIR, it seemed silly to be developing anything like that for a desktop when the browser is two clicks away. However, take a look at Google's Gmail application and I think you see many of the same ideas are leveraged into the user experience.

Connectivity - When the connection dies on a page, it literally kills the user experience. Google and Adobe both know and combat this with the appropriate ajax.

Load Time - How many times should your interface graphics and interaction logic have to be reloaded? With intelligent design, not more than once a day. This frees more bandwidth for unique data that is important to the user and minimizes wait time. Everyone hates the fact that windows takes anywhere from a half minute to several minutes to load, yet no one complains about a couple seconds of load time. All of that time accumilates however and people spend upwards of 10 to 20 minutes daily waiting for page loads.

Ease of Design - Have you ever tried to make a windows app look good? I can guarantee you...not fun, and not usually very easy. The dev time on true windows applications tends to be longer than web applications. However, once you've developed the web application, an ajax or Adobe Air application is the next logical step.

Memory Footprint - Air applications should have a smaller overall footprint than IE and Firefox if for no other reason than because Flash Applications have always been produced to load only what is needed. That means you for all proctical purposes should be truncating features you don't need from your browser. With IE and Firefox, you are pretty much stuck with whatever they give you.