The release of Adobe's AIR software development system is a significant event, one you'll want to be aware of in terms of how you run your business and home computers for the next few years.

Not that Adobe will necessarily win the battle for the crowded space where the Web and desktop software programs interact.

No, AIR is important because it flags the point where a set of new technologies truly begins to take hold and computing habits change.

I could tell you to go download AIR, but you don't really need to. Think of AIR as the background services that run when you gain access to a new breed of software.

When you download a program designed to work with AIR, the AIR package is downloaded along with it, and you're quickly up to speed. The idea is that desktop software, including word processors and financial managers, will begin to work in a far more seamless, interactive way with whatever Internet tools it finds.

You can think of online applications such as Google's, but AIR goes these one better by bringing much of the functionality of a program on your local PC onto the Net.

The best way to show you this is by pointing you to a few programs that have already been crafted to work with AIR. The one that caught my eye first was eBay Desktop (desktop.ebay.com). It was a quick download and, as I mentioned, the AIR software arrived with it. Soon I had a new icon on my desktop and a full-featured eBay manager that ran outside my browser.

Remember the new model: These programs are increasingly aware of Internet connectivity and perform many updating processes transparently behind the scenes. When I launch eBay Desktop, I have a dedicated program that pulls in all my eBay information from the main site and displays it within its own format. It's fast, and the interface is logical, working without the need to constantly refresh pages to see new bidding or explore a list of search results item by item.

Moreover, I can set up my auctions offline. The program knows to upload the listings the next time I connect to the Internet.

This has been, of course, a major objection to using software exclusively on the Web. When Google first released its word processor, spreadsheet and other online programs, their limited functionality seemed to be made up for by the ability to get your documents from any Web-linked computer.

But connectivity cannot be assumed. Google released its Gears program as an attempt to use online software offline and meld the desktop experience with what was on the Net.

But AIR hopes to bring a boost in program performance.

Putting it to the test

I checked out Buzzword, an online word processor from Adobe (www.buzzword.com). The first thing I noticed was that the program was buggy. Clearly, we're early in the development process here, but I should add that Buzzword works fine under Windows -- the bugs show up in the still-unfinished Linux version. I switched to Windows and noticed that text entry was substantially quicker with Buzzword than with Google Docs, a factor for me because I'm a fast typist.

But what really stands out is the attempt to bring desktop program power to this Web application. Beyond pull-down menus to manage operations, you have the use of drag-and-drop operations with your mouse, standard on stand-alone PC programs but a novelty in a Web-based program. Like Microsoft's Silverlight, AIR points toward software that can be used over the Net with fewer compromises in performance, providing an acceptable user experience in both environments and cashing in the advantages of Web availability.

For the Web is wherever you can get access to it, and with more mobile devices out there, AIR plays to the idea that we'll want to move quickly between desktop and phone or PDA. That led me to the New York Times' entry in AIR software, ShifD (www.shifd.com). The idea is that you can drop notes or links to things you have read into your desktop ShifD program, which synchronizes itself with your mobile devices. Anything you put into ShifD is immediately available on your phone and vice versa.

But ShifD, while it rides the AIR platform, doesn't impress me as much as the other two. I think that's because the kind of connection it offers can be easily done through other means, such as sending yourself e-mail, using Jott's phone to e-mail service or even using Web-based tools that are already out there, such as bookmarking service del.icio.us.

On the other hand, AOL's Xdrive (www.xdrive.com) has an AIR application that helps you manage Web-based information in folder format. Drag and drop files between your hard disk and and files stored on the Net -- Xdrive offers 5 gigabytes of free Web storage.

We'll see hundreds of AIR applications as developers try to figure out how to use these tools. The overall point is that we're moving to a future where your programs can use all of your computer's resources, like today, while operating in an increasingly transparent way with Net-based resources.

Mozilla is also joining this fray with an open source contribution, Prism, and both Sun Microsystems and Google remain active in this segment.

An unsettled and ferociously creative period for software seems to be in the making.

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