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Have you found an AIR app you actually use yet?

6 Comments

Today I downloaded the BBC’s new Adobe AIR application, BBC Live.

This installs as a system tray app on Windows. It’s a beta. Nice little app; but it’s competing against my existing RSS reader which is subscribed to the BBC news feed. The AIR app is much prettier, has images, and lets you customise the feed easily. However, the RSS reader deals with lots of feeds; and I can’t imagine running a separate application for every one. The advantages of the BBC app are rather small compared to the convenience of using a single application for multiple news sources.

Lifehacker recently published a list of the top ten apps worth installing Adobe AIR for. The list had a contrary affect on me, since there is nothing there that I find really compelling. I tried the eBay Desktop app, for example, but much prefer visiting the web site.

So … personally, I’m still waiting for an AIR app to love. But I’d be interested to know what others are running and finding useful.

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6 thoughts on “Have you found an AIR app you actually use yet?”

  2. I haven’t even found a Silverlight application I want to use yet. Given SVG+Javascript+HTML, I don’t really see the point of even the Flash runtime. We have the technologies in every browser as standard for doing this stuff, why bother with a plugin?

  3. I still don’t use a single .NET application. Some parts of Delphi depend on .NET, but they’re optional and I certainly don’t love them. Also I don’t use Java applications, except the plugin for the browser. It seems it could be a slow cycle.

  5. My first shot at AIR was Spaz, a Twitter reporter. Of course, Twitter has its own problems and I have finally been co-opted to FriendFeed and I will install Twhirl because it lets me hook up FriendFeed too.

    I much prefer my RSS aggregator (monitoring 464 feeds as of this morning), and I even use summize and also capture the RSS feed of my own tweets and replies to me.

    I will also install the Pandora AIR application today, since I am going to be installing Twhirl anyhow, and have Acrobat 9.0 in the queue too.

    [Odd how the comment feed forked into a question of .NET and Silverlight.]

  6. Oh, thought I didn’t complete:

    The Twitter and FriendFeed streams are so noisy that I would hate to have them in RSS, because of all the pruning that would take (I use a desktop RSS reader integrated into Outlook and archive the entries I like, can search them with desktop search, etc.)

    But back to AIR, the applets are Spaz to be followed by Twhirl, and the Pandora thingy because the browser-window version is a problem when I want to browse other things while listening to music.

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