5 Adobe AIR apps I use every day

Posted by on Jun 3, 2009 in AIR | 5 comments

adobe_air_logo.pngYes I know… I work for Adobe and some of you will call me (and have called me) an Adobe fanboy. I’m fine with that. However, I honestly think that Adobe AIR has greatly changed the way people think about application development. I’m sure most of you know that Adobe AIR allows you to build applications that run across Windows, OS X and Linux based systems. The fact that you can build them with web technologies like JavaScript and Flash really opened up this market to all web developers. As a web developer, you don’t have to learn anything new to build desktop applications — applications that you build once and run on all the operating systems that AIR supports.

But this post was supposed to be about AIR apps I use on a daily basis. So here we go…

destroytwitter.jpgDestroyTwitter
There are a bunch of Twitter apps out there that are built on AIR and everyone has their own favorite. DestroyTwitter is my favorite. I like it for the uncluttered interface and its small footprint. One of the most common comments about AIR apps is that they use a lot of memory. DestroyTwitter shows that the opposite can be true. Just the other day, my Finder was actually using double the amount of memory that DestroyTwitter was using.

empdir.jpgAdobe Directory (internal only but source available)
With over 5000 people working at Adobe, getting information about a colleague was really challenging before we started using this app. It has all the important information like phone numbers, email, location and manager name but it can even look up the person’s Exchange calendar to see if he/she is available at a certain time. The app actually uses ColdFusion to get the information from the Exchange server.

By the way… Did you know that ColdFusion is a full Exchange client? With just a couple lines of code, you can get a person’s calendar, contacts, emails, …

espresso.jpgEspressoReader
EspressoReader is an RSS reader built on AIR but it syncs up with your Google Reader account. Next to my MacBook Pro, I also regularly use my EEEPC to catch up with blog posts and by syncing up with Google Reader, my EspressoReader apps on both machines are always up to date with where I left off.

polaris.jpgPolaris
This app is the new brainchild from Nicolas Lierman. I’m sure you remember the Google Analytics AIR app that Nicolas built.

Just a few months ago, Nicolas started DesktopReporting.com, his own company in which he is building a bunch of apps on top of Google Analytics. Polaris is the first app he released and is a widget style app that allows you to keep up to date on your webstats.

Application X
This is an app that I can’t talk about :D It’s still under heavy development but is already one of the apps I use daily. I’m not sure when/if this will see daylight but I will blog about it if it does.

This is just a small list of apps that I really use every single day. There are a bunch of other apps that I regularly use but listing those would make this post like an AIR app directory and that’s not what I wanted ;-) You should definitely check out Refreshing Apps and the AIR Marketplace for more cool apps.

I’m also interested to know which apps you use every day… Feel free to leave a comment!

5 Comments

  1. George
    June 3, 2009

    I was just preparing a basic AIR presentation and I was in need of samples so your post came just in time … thanks!

  2. Jonas De Smet
    June 3, 2009

    Boohoe Serge! :) It isn’t the first time you mention “Application X”. When well you announce it or tell us more about it?! ;-)

  3. TJ Downes
    June 3, 2009

    “By the way… Did you know that ColdFusion is a full Exchange client? With just a couple lines of code, you can get a person’s calendar, contacts, emails,”

    Well, not entirely true. You can’t send emails from it via Exchange :)

    Otherwise, there’s not a lot preventing someone from making an AIR-based Exchange client that mimics Outlook functionality. Would be nice for Mac and Linux users especially!

  4. Ben Forta
    June 3, 2009

    TJ,

    >> Well, not entirely true. You can’t send emails from it via Exchange :)

    Well, you can, via :-) But yes, it probably should be native, too.

    — Ben

  5. James Whittaker
    June 4, 2009

    nice thanks for the mention of RefreshingApps Serge, also on Twitter I started #AIRAppFriday hashtag.

    So on fridays tweet out what AIR app you are using this week, what has inspired you or what AIr appis just too darn cool!