I just discovered Shu, a wrapper for Adobe's Flash wrapper, AIR. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but some of its key features sound great.

First, it allows you to bypass installing AIR on the end user's system. I love this feature because it tackles one of the major points I disagree with Adobe on. Forcing users to install an 8MB base for what would normally be a 1-2MB application makes an arrogant (and wrong) assumption that most people would install more than 4 or 5 AIR applications on the same computer, which is the point where the 8MB investment would even start to pay off. This feature only benefits developer types who would play with a bunch of different AIR applications. It does not have any real benefit for average users, and developers don't benefit either because their applications won't use any new version unless they create a patch that enables it to. More than anything, it looks like an idea that somebody just wasn't willing to let go. Leaving multiple versions of AIR on the user's system to accommodate different version AIR applications totally undermines the whole exercise anyway, and any alleged benefit is lost.

In the end, it didn't look like it worked out the way they wanted it to anyway, but rather than scrap it and recode everything, they pushed forward with an idea that couldn't really deliver on its promise (keeping AIR apps up to date with the latest version – the entire beta cycle proved how it just couldn't work – welcome to Microsoft's problem with Windows backwards compatibility hell). It could have just as easily been included in the single exe and there would be no real difference. I could argue this point all day about how it doesn't benefit the end user or the developer, but I'll save it for the comments. Suffice to say, the Shu team shares the same outlook.

Second, Shu enables you to do all the things that every other wrapper out there except AIR can do. Adobe opted out, for "security" reasons, on providing the same powerful features that every other wrapper and pretty much any executable application out there has. Sure sure, they claim they'll add them later and that they didn't have time to put them in this round, but let's be real here. Adobe left those features out because Adobe's legal team told them they had to.

If somebody writes a malicious application using some small company's Flash wrapper, it's not worth suing the wrapper company because they don't have any money. On the other hand, Adobe is abundantly wealthy and a prime target for lawyers out to make a buck, knowing they can likely get Adobe to settle for an amount that would make the lawsuit worthwhile. Adobe played it safe and so their wrapper has less features than every other wrapper out there. Thankfully, Shu is promising all the features AIR should have had but Adobe didn't provide.

I'm sure that the features in Shu are going to be welcome to many AIR developers out there. Features like the ability to use MySQL instead of SQLLite, to launch other applications, to open documents using their native applications, to have system prompts and message boxes, to get common folder paths, screen capturing, and running .dll files on Windows. Things other wrappers have but Adobe's wrapper doesn't.

Hopefully, Shu will deliver on its promise of making the Adobe Flash wrapper everything it should have been. I'm looking forward to exploring its features more fully over the next few weeks.

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I'd like to add a footnote. I'm aware that another one of the reasons for a distributed runtime is the considerable size of the integrated Webkit browser. I'm glad we have it, but still think the embedded runtime is a better way to go. Just offer the ability to not include the Webkit browser on AIR applications that don't need it. A simple checkbox would go a long way towards solving the issue.