In reference to the release of twitterAIR, Simon writes:

Hi Aaron, as much as I'd love to see your code for the AIR app, I won't bug you for it. But I did want to ask why you packaged it as an AIR app. It's the second Twitter app done in Flex but shipped as a wrapped AIR file and I'm wondering if both developers (that's you as well) ran into some kind of browser limitation.

While I currently don't have plans to share the code for twitterAIR in it's entirety I don't have a problem with discussing how things were done. In fact, I plan on posting a few blog entries on working with the file/directory API, creating custom form validators, and other features.

To answer your question, I didn't even consider building twitterAIR to work in the browser. If someone wants to post tweets using a browser I'd recommend using the twitter.com Web site. My focus was building an AIR application right from the start. To me it just makes sense to use a desktop application to post tweets, just like it makes sense to use the desktop for instant messaging. I tried a few Twitter applications that run on the desktop including Tweet-r (another AIR app) as well as Twitteriffic. I wasn't completely satisfied by any of them (though both are very good) plus I wanted to build an app that showcased a few of the things you can do with Flex-based AIR applications. A detailed list of these features can be found at the bottom of this entry.