Tech Tools: AdobeAIR Apps
Adobe Delivers
If you haven’t heard about this yet, it’s worth checking out… Adobe has released a “cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash®, and Flex technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop” (more info). In other words, web developers can use the same web tools like Dreamweaver and Flash to develop feature-rich desktop applications.
Great For Developers
If your business has any kind of web presence, this could be a great tool for you. Why? Your customers don’t even need to launch a browser to find you. Your application, branded with your logo, could be sitting right on their desktop. You could package your website or web service for easy desktop delivery. You can even expand to offer features not readily supported by browsers. Take eBay, for example. Alan Lewis, eBay’s product manager, said “We wanted for a long time to create a desktop presence. Previously, our team agreed it was too expensive and couldn’t be done. Then along came Adobe AIR.”
Using eBay’s desktop application, users can get instantaneous alerts about items they’re bidding on, so they no longer have to be checking their email for updates on a regular basis. Buyers can also set up feeds that automatically search and list items based on specified keywords. More on eBay Desktop from the source.
Make Development Even Easier
If you’ve got a cool website or application you’d like to make desktop accessible, you’re in luck! You don’t need to mess around with dev kits or programming in Flex or Flash. The good folks down at arc90lab have developed the AIRifier, which takes any existing website and turns it into a downloadable desktop app at the click of a button. This little video shows how the whole thing works:
The video walks you through the basics of creating a desktop GMail application for your own personal use. It can be used for any website and seems to work pretty well. This could save you, as a developer, a whole lot of time and money, but may not take full advantage of AIR’s features.
Great For Consumers and Business Users
There are a number of AIR applications out there (all free) which are extremely useful. Adobe hosts the Adobe AIR Marketplace where developers can share their applications, and there are currently over 200 applications available. To be honest, many of them are crap (like the Javascript “Guess the number” game), but there are some worthwhile apps out there. Here are a few of the better ones:
Ora Time and Expense
This is my personal favorite: track time and expenses for projects and clients, then automatically generate invoices, time sheets and expense reports. Here’s the cool part: if you have a webcam, you can simply hold a receipt up to the camera, take a picture, and automatically add it to an expense report. Check it out.
Google Analytics AIR
AboutNico has put together a pretty impressive Google Analytics desktop application. You can view all kinds of cool reports on your website’s traffic in completely interactive graphs. You can set up multiple profiles to track any and all of your websites’ traffic, page views, time on site, unique visitors, and all the important details you’d want as a webmaster. The information can easily be exported as a report to Excel or PDF. Give it a try.
Kuler Desktop
This is a cool little application for designers. Use this app to browse a library of color themes (over 12,000 themes currently available). When you find a theme you like, you can import it directly into Adobe Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop. If you don’t use Adobe, you can easily copy the hex values of the colors to your clipboard, from which you can use them elsehwere. (Thanks to motiondesign for the picture). Try Kuler Desktop out for yourself.
Sky’s the Limit
So far, I’ve only tried out a handful of these Air apps, but I have been pretty impressed. I’m considering re-tooling my online training program to run in Adobe AIR, mostly because that desktop presence would be so great.
How do you see yourself using Adobe AIR, either as a developer or as a consumer? It seems like this has almost limitless potential in the right hands. Let me know what kind of potential you see!
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[…] Kyle Claypool, Tech Tools: AdobeAIR Apps […]
July 13th, 2008 at 1:11 pm