I see a lot of requests for new AIR features on blogs, sent in via Adobe's web site, and sometimes on comments posted here. That's great, and the AIR team takes all of these into consideration.
These requests are often accompanied by straw-man arguments detailing why we haven't included these features yet—and then more arguments demolishing those straw-man arguments. No doubt this is intended to remove the obstacle that had prevented us from implementing this feature.
Amusingly, the straw-man arguments are basically all wrong. I thought I'd take the time to post some of these and refute their accuracy, with the ultimate goal of providing a better understanding of how we do make decisions.
Today's straw man: Feature x hasn't been implemented because of its perceived security risk.
This argument is (correctly) knocked down each time by noting that AIR applications are desktop applications and can already do dangerous things. It doesn't make sense for us to limit new features that aren't any more dangerous. We do design features to default to safe behaviors, but we don't reject features just because they might be dangerous, too. The feature you want might well be dangerous, but I can assure you that's not why it isn't yet implemented.
