13 Adobe AIR Applications to Make Your Life Easier

Posted 08/24/2009 at 12:46pm | by Florence Ion

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They’re lighter, they’re (sometimes) faster, and they take up less hard drive space than most programs — they’re Adobe Air applications. Though they appropriately live up to their name, these tiny apps do not skim on features. From shopping to managing online photos or streaming digital music, Adobe Air is making it easier to run multiple processes at one time without straining your system. Sometimes, when Photoshop is too much and Firefox has too many tabs open, we just want to open up one more application without using up all our RAM.

The Adobe Air Marketplace offers a substantial list of freeware and shareware Air applications that simplify our lives and make it just a bit easier to finish the task at hand. Though there’s a great selection of all sorts of useful and entertaining applications and desktop widgets, we’ve compiled our list of our favorite, and free, utilitarian Adobe Air applications.

Get To-Do List Reminders with Doomi

Every multi-tasker needs a solid to-do list if they want to get anything done. Fortunately for them, Doomi facilitates in aiding the erratic habits of overachievers, while administering itself in a friendlier manner. Though the interface leaves a bit to be desired in the aesthetics department, you can rely on Doomi to remind you when a task needs to be finished by configuring a pop-up alarm to remind you to do so. 

Read RSS Feeds with Google ReadAir

This featherweight application helps display our daily Google Reader feeds in one fell swoop, without the hassle of firing up a browser. Though it’s still in the beginning stages of development, it makes it so you don’t have to be engaged in a browser to read through your headlines. ReadAir is also great for Google users that have more than one account and can’t be bothered to switch back and forth. Unfortunately ReadAir still lacks a few useful features — like adding new feeds or reading entire articles. The web browser isn't obsolete just yet!

Keep an Eye on Google Analytics with Polaris

If you’ve got a website that needs tracking, or you heavily rely on site hits for revenue, Polaris will display real time traffic information. After your register yourself with Google analytics, install the application, follow the log-in prompt screen, and you’re all set up to watch your site grow. You can check website traffic from your desktop without the inconvenience of a web browser, change the date range with a sliding scale, and sort through different analytics categories (such as visits, map overlay, traffic sources, etc). The free version of Polaris allows you to track one site, otherwise you’ll need to fork over 15$ to follow multiple accounts.

Edit Flash Video with RichFLV

RichFLV can read flash video metadata, edit and modify cue points, extract audio, cut down video files, or convert them to SWF. Alas, our discovery of this application brings more meaning to these stored flash video files taking up space on our desktop. Tip: If you’re looking to extract audio from a flash file, export it as a sound only .FLV file, then open it back up in RichFLV and export is as an audio (.mp3) file.

Fuel Your Twitter Addiction with Tweetdeck 

There are Twitter users, and then there are Twitter fiends. Fortunately, TweetDeck offers something for both parties. This nifty, all-encompassing Air application will update you to the minute on your friend’s tweets, their @ replies to you, any direct messages you may have received, as well as display the global tweet feed. If you’re also addicted to your Facebook feed, there’s an option to tack that on so you can keep tabs across the entire social networking spectrum. We do warn you, however, that once you install and run Tweetdeck, you may have a difficult time focusing on getting any work done at all!

Use DiggTop to Track News and Internet Memes

DiggTop is a desktop application that allows you to follow trends and topics developing on Digg. You can configure it to display categories based on predetermined topics, or type in your own keyword. You can also filter out “bad words” so that nothing offensive, or aggregated by 4chan, will show up in the queue. If you count Digg as one of your main sources of web news and entertainment, consider this an essential widget.