Monday, March 31, 2008

For those writing and deploying AIR applications, you probably dig the most the ability write once and deploy for Mac and PC. You don't need to worry about wrappers and custom APIs per operating system because the player and the wrapper takes care of that for you.

You can do quite a bit with the AIR APIs that are presently available to you, but some would like more hooks, deeper hooks, and you can get some of that with Shu. However, you'll be taking your AIR application and deploying a standalone executable for Mac and/or Windows separately.

I assume the write-once and deploy for both holds up... the wrapper will take care of the extras.

One one hand this is really cool. If you have a specific need and AIR alone presents most of it & you only need a little extra... Shu seems like a perfect fit. You will lose the ability to distribute the application as a .air file though, but you might be distributing the application on CDRom, explicit download per OS, etc. so it wouldn't matter to you.

On the other hand, you'll have to manage two iterations of the application if you choose to support Mac and Windows. Again, this might not be a big deal to you.

What does Shu-Player offer you as a developer? You can read the command list here. You can even use the Shu Extensions API to author and add custom commands if you know some C/C++.

I have zero experience with this product. And its not cheap... £250 for both versions (about $500 US dollars). There is a demo for this. Anyone have any pointers about this product?

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