Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez has posted an online training session on the new RoboHelp Packager for AIR, a new Adobe Labs download that allows you to roll a RoboHelp project into a standalone app that runs on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform.
AIR is beginning to look like an interesting cross-platform option for online help and performance support systems, since you can include typical navigation aids (such as table of contents, index, search, glossary, favorites, etc.), provide auto-updates and even roll in existing PDF content into a standalone package that will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.
The AIR runtime is a free download that includes a WebKit browser and Adobe Flash engine to enable desktop use of Internet applications–even offline. So while the technology is fairly new, it may prove very useful in the development of cross-platform help solutions.