AIR has launched, so what's next? In his presentation this morning Adobe's new CTO, Kevin Lynch actually shared some ideas/trends that he thinks are coming up. One of the idea that I thought was quite interesting was the shift Lynch sees at Adobe (and probably in the software industry at large) of designing user interfaces, from mobile devices/small screens to PCs/large screens to the 3rd screen being the set-top-box/TV. Rather than the other way around like it is done today.

To prove his point, Lynch showed an example of an AIR application that fitted the screen of a cell phone and that could be added dynamically new features or linked to other AIR applications, on the PC version. All this using a "flexible design environment". The mobile AIR app will be sort of "widgets" on the PC but that could then be dynamically part of a larger app as well.

"Right now, most of the software we make at Adobe is for PC with big screens, most of the people that use that software produce content for people using big screens and PC... I believe this is going to shift in the next few years. We're going to start thinking designing for mobile first and then figure out how to make it work on a big screen, that's going be liberating actually because coming down from a big screen to a small screen doesn't really work that well when you shrink it.. but if you design small it's a lot easier to make those bigger", said Kevin Lynch.

The other trend Lynch pointed to is the idea that a vast majority of people in the world might actually never use a PC to connect to the Internet. Thus his demo of AIR on a cell phone that had a very similar look of an iPhone... or at least a large touch screen smartphone!

"As people starting adopting mobile devices more and more, or in some countries starting with mobile and maybe never use a computer, the design centre of what we build will be in mobile first".