The Adobe  AIR  runtime was designed to allow developers to use Adobe Flash and FLEX to build "rich media" applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems. Today, a vast majority of web widgets are written in Adobe Flash.  This allows them to run on a broad range of social networking, community and blog sites. Creating Adobe AIR versions of these widgets enables them to function as desktop widgets with very little extra work.  In the past, developers had to package Flash widgets on one of the desktop widget platforms (MacOS, Vista, Yahoo! widgets, i.e.) or use ZINC to create destkop version of their widgets. Some of these options were limited to certain platforms, while other options were cumbersome or expensive.

Adobe AIR is looking like a very attractive widget development platform. Like the recently updated Yahoo! widget engine, AIR supports WebKit, SQLite, XML, AJAX and Javascript.  Like the Yahoo! widget engine, users have to download and install the Adobe AIR runtime (approximately 15MB vs Yahoo's 23MB).  Additionally, Adobe AIR runs on Microsoft Windows 2000; Windows XP; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise; Mac OS X (10.4, 10.5); and Linux - pretty much everything! More to come on Adobe AIR widget development!