The ugly side of developing AIR HTML apps

I’ve been developing with AIR for over a year now. It’s all been HTML/JavaScript apps, but the complexity of most of them has been pretty low. Spaz, the Twitter client I created , definitely isn’t simple, though – mostly because I’m kind of a crappy coder, but also because it just does a lot of stuff. Lately I’ve been getting a little bummed about AIR, because I’m starting to bump into limitations of the platform more and more. What’s particularly frustrating is that some of these limitations are specific to HTML AIR app dev. So what follows is a couple of issues that have been particularly troublesome when developing Spaz and other HTML/JS AIR apps. AIR gets greedy under OS X Julien Viet, who has contributed significantly to Spaz , made a post recently about the base resources used by the AIR runtime . In it he finds that the basic “Hello World” sample app provided by Adobe used about 20MB of RAM...