Very well said, dools. I'm a co-founder of the app in question, which is HipChat (http://www.hipchat.com).
If we'd started out making native apps for every platform we wouldn't be where we are today. Sure AIR isn't perfect but it's allowed a 3-man bootstrapped team to create a product that hundreds of companies love to use every day and are happy to pay for.
Alex mentioned his team was going to try setting up their own IRC or Jabber server. That's awesome! The whole reason we're creating HipChat is because the vast majority of business have absolutely NO IDEA how to do that. The fact that more technical teams are willing to invest their precious work hours setting up and maintaining their own group chat system is a testament to how powerful a tool it is.
Of course if you set up your own chat system you won't get drag + drop file sharing, archived history, or inline image previews no matter how technical your team is. :)
Oh and we'll be opening up XMPP access soon so anyone who really needs a native app is more than welcome to build one.
I rationally agree with the decision your team has made, but I realized I no longer have any AIR apps running on any of my systems. They've been unconsciously filtered out for native or web alternatives.
If your team does decide to build for a platform/OS I hope it's OS X first :D. Best of luck either way!
If we'd started out making native apps for every platform we wouldn't be where we are today. Sure AIR isn't perfect but it's allowed a 3-man bootstrapped team to create a product that hundreds of companies love to use every day and are happy to pay for.
Alex mentioned his team was going to try setting up their own IRC or Jabber server. That's awesome! The whole reason we're creating HipChat is because the vast majority of business have absolutely NO IDEA how to do that. The fact that more technical teams are willing to invest their precious work hours setting up and maintaining their own group chat system is a testament to how powerful a tool it is.
Of course if you set up your own chat system you won't get drag + drop file sharing, archived history, or inline image previews no matter how technical your team is. :)
Oh and we'll be opening up XMPP access soon so anyone who really needs a native app is more than welcome to build one.