Adobe Air - pop them into your desktop

    The Internet eats into our lives like salt in boots on a cold winter day, and we just continue to rejoice at this. Opening these evil networks every day like classmates, VKontakte, Twitter, Facebook, and what the hell isn’t joking - Habr, we eagerly open our eyes and look for updated information. But along the way of the erring social Internet wanderer, His Majesty always invariably accompanies his browser. Yes, let it be firefox or opera, it doesn’t matter - the browser remains the browser with all its limitations. To get on the Internet for a start you have to run it. One of the most interesting developments of Adobe - Adobe AIR allows you to get rid of "browser tyranny" and get direct access to your favorite web services.

    What is Adobe AIR?
    Adobe air- In simple terms, this is a tool for transferring Web applications to the desktop. This is an attempt by Adobe to combine concepts such as the Internet and the desktop into a single whole. This is exactly what the Mozilla guys should have done instead of the already mentioned Prism . You must agree that it’s much more convenient to read friends’s feed on twitter or friendfeed, as well as leave comments not through the browser, but with the help of some software quietly sitting for the time being in the tray or just read RSS, view mail and video from YouTube, as if - in a regular player, all this will help you to implement AIR, as well as a number of ready-made applications for it.
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    Cross-platform is one of the advantages of this platform - developers assure that AIR will work equally well for both Windows andMac OS and naturally for Linux-systems (which I honestly doubt a bit, at such moments you are especially glad that you are the owner of the time-tested Windows XP :)) Of the drawbacks, it can be noted that the applications on AIR even moved to the desktop, but at heart these are all the same small utilities for working with Internet sites, so in most situations, the functionality of the programs could be completely implemented on the site itself. But we will not go in cycles in trifles. It’s better to see it once than read it five times, especially for toys like AIR, so look at the screen better ...

    The first application on which I evaluated the capabilities of Adobe AIR was the notorious Alert Thingy - a client for working with a social aggregatorfriendfeed (Let me remind you that once, I already talked about him in the evolution of blogging , and also talked about the facebook application for frenfid ). To my surprise - I saw a really full-fledged reference client. It had everything that was needed to work with friendfeed: it was not only a friend’s feed and a comment form - Alert Thingy skillfully minimized to tray, filled in bells when new messages arrived, and also shortened links using the TinyUrl.com service, and in addition supported work with twitter and flickr, and all this is wrapped in several beautiful templates for the client itself - what else is needed for social happiness ??
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    For alternatives, too, is not stuck. Didn't like Alert Thingy? Try twhirl! Initially, he was conceived as a client for the twitter microblogging service twitter , but now with the help of it you can also connect your friendfeed account. Not hooked neither one nor the other? Please alternative to mysocial24 × 7 alternative . In general, fans of microblogging will not be offended - it would be time to try and choose the best for yourself.

    But not microblogging valuable AIR. ReadAir Application- This is a desktop client for the well-known Google Reader service. As in the case of Alert Thingy in the program window, you can do everything that you would do on the site itself. Of the features of the program, developers highlight full synchronization with your Google account, search on your feeds, the ability to edit tags, auto login and auto-update. I think every Google Reader user dreamed of such a program - it’s really troublesome to keep a tab open with it all the time, but open ReadAir just right, you can say the perfect desktop RSS client, naturally if you are satisfied with Google Reader. Among the shortcomings - the program completely refused to work through a proxy, so until the developers understand this problem, for me there is a big bold cross on it.
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    Doomi- this is another great application for Adobe Air with its help, you will always have at hand a tool for working with so-called to-do lists. The program is simple, there are basically no settings there, only the most necessary and quite suitable for daily tasks, probably for this reason the task execution interval starts from one hour to one day.
    In the future, the developers plan to add skins to the program and do what the program lacked from the very beginning - Offline / Online synchronization, therefore, I think it’s worth checking for updates of this tiny little thing, maybe for many it will become a real solution to problems.
    Video services did not go unnoticed. for example, the FLVPlay application is, so to speak, youtubehome delivery. It is enough to enter a keyword or username on youtube and the program will carefully sort the videos by the given parameters, and if necessary, play them in the same window. Unlike my fellow workers, which I wrote about above, FLVPlay does not have advanced functionality, so in the program you can only find, play and download the necessary video from youtube in flv format, and also does not support Russian at all. But the developers of another AIR-application went further than their colleagues. Their mooFlair program allows you to watch videos not only from YouTube, but also from BlipTv , Dailymotion , as well as Metacafe .

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    At mooFlairyou can create your own playlists, regardless of the account on the site, watch videos in full screen, conveniently sort videos found, and a more advanced interface - these are what distinguish this player from its predecessor, but as with FlvPlay, don’t wait support for the Russian language, the search is carried out only in English.
    If you are comfortable watching videos on youtube itself, but you also want to download videos to your computer, the very tiny AIRTube application will help you , after installation you just need to enter the video address on YouTube and AirTube will give you a link to the FLV file.
    This is only a small part of programs written using Adobe AIR. You will find the rest on the official website , as well as on freshairapps.
    As you can see, most Air programs have an attractive interface, but in terms of functionality they are not much different from their Web progenitors. I hope that soon Adobe AIR will somehow solve this problem, but it will not be up to the developers of the programs. In the meantime, it remains for us to use even small, but moderately convenient utilities, the number of which is growing every day.

    Via AD28

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