Today I decided I better get into the Twitter scene, so I decided to find some AIR applications for it. To my surprise, I found 8 AIR applications for Twitter. Do you have recommendations on which one is the best?

Desktop Keeley, the AIR application built for the Sun newspaper in the UK, "has beaten previous download figures for Sun apps after only three days" according to this article.

There's nothing like a lingerie model dancing on your desktop for driving downloads.

Earlier this week the eBay desktop was downloaded for the 1 millionth time. That's a great accomplishment for one of the first AIR apps that's been developed.

That application was originally built by a summer intern of mine, Charles Bihis, who is now working at Adobe in Seattle. He developed the initial AS 3 APIs and a very earlly alpha version of eBay Desktop. The team at effectiveUI took the project on after a conversation I had with them in a bus in San Francisco after the first Adobe component developer summit run by Ted Patrick. They're the ones who have made it look so great and added most of the functionality that it has today.

Congrats Alan on the great success. The project would be dead without your great support.

Sex sells. No doubt about it. Last week's strip poker story received 3,000+ reads, while the story about the geek cruise received only a few hundred. This story should get a few thousand at least. The Sun newspaper in the UK has created an AIR application called Desktop Keeley, which does two things really. One is an RSS reader - it provides news and sports information to your desktop, along with updates about their Page 3 girl.

The other aspect of the application is a Page 3 girl herself - Keeley. Using some petty cool transparent video, Keeley will come out every few minutes onto your desktop wearing lingerie. See the image below for an example.

The application was created by the team at Glue London. The transparent video is actually really cool - there are some neat ones like when she writes on your desktop or when she shoots your monitor that are pretty cool.

Via Andrew Shorten. Nice find Andrew. And I did install this for research purposes, as you suggested. :)

TechCrunch is running a story about Tokbox, who today released an Adobe AIR desktop client that allows users on Windows, Mac and Linux to do video chatting, absolutely free.

The video quality on the application is really good, as is the audio quality (after a few quick minutes testing it at work - not sure what it would be like over the Internet tubes, but the local network tubes were good).

The desktop AIR application is identical to the web based application that they have online, which is really well done.

The only problem I had was when I installed the application, it did prompt me to import my contacts from other IM clients, which was nice. But it would be even better if all these IM companies shared my information with one and another. That's not a complaint about Tokbox per say, just IM in general, though its something that they're going to have to deal with.

Activa Live Chat, a Flex based live chat solution for websites, recently launched a new desktop client based on Adobe AIR. The desktop version has the exact same UI as the web version, but with a number of added benefits - the most important one being taskbar (Windows) or dock (OS X) notifications of incoming messages.

I've tested out Activa Live Chat before, and its really easy to integrate into your website. They provide a JavaScript snippet that you put into your webpage, and that JavaScript launches the Activa Live Chat header window when the page loads. If you're looking to integrate Live Chat into your existing RIA, they have an SDK available.

Activa Live Chat is available as a hosted solution for websites looking to incorporate live chat into their site. A free 14 day trial is also available.

FedEx has recently launched a desktop application that allows customers to track packages and notifications on their desktops, without having to connect to the Internet. After downloading the free application, customers are prompted to login to FedEx, and can then track shipments that they have sent. The complete list of features for the application is available, or if you're interested you can go straight to the download.

Pandora launched an Adobe AIR powered desktop version of their web application yesterday. As with the web version, this version only works for visitors from the United States (as you can see in the message below). The new application is nearly the same as their web based version - with the main advantage being you can click on a desktop icon to launch the app, rather than having to start your browser. Right clicking on the desktop icon will also give you a menu of options, allowing you to pause the music or switch stations easily.

TechCrunch doesn't give it a glowing review, saying

Unfortunately, the AIR version of Pandora doesn’t do much to actually improve the user experience. See that screenshot above? You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a screenshot of the regular Pandora homepage. It’s actually a screenshot of the AIR application itself. ...

If Pandora is going to make this work, it’ll need to find a way around the advertising conundrum. But even if it does, it won’t be the only one. I imagine that lots of web services will have to wrestle with how to provide maximum functionality through AIR without sacrificing too much ad revenue. The problem is only exacerbated with a service like Pandora that’s so simple to operate.

I totally agree. The problem here is Pandora's revenue model, which is advertising based. That constraint doesn't allow them to provide the functionality that users want - namely to minimize the player in the corner of the screen, like you can do with iTunes. They either need to think of other ways to advertise in the application (text ads in the menu you get from the dock icon?), or come up with a paid subscription model. Personally, I think the latter is the way to go, but there have been very few companies that make it work. The user experience has to be so good that people are willing to pay extra for it - so far that's been a tough sell for rich Internet applications.

Ryan Stewart has some more information as well, as does Download Squad.

EarthBrowser is a super cool Adobe AIR application that allows users to see all sorts of data on top of a 3D representation of earth. Data such as earthquakes, weather, clouds, tropical storms, tectonic plates and more can all be enabled or disabled over top of a 3D Earth, with some data displayed using a time animation. Its a bit like Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth, but done in Flash and AIR by one guy.

You can spin the globe and browse events by spinning the globe and then clicking on the data points - you can even go back in time, and change the data in view by moving a slide back - data from up to 6 hours earlier is available.

The use of AIR is well done, as it allows you to drag and drop KML files from the browser or desktop into the application - an easy way to add data to the application.

The application is written by Matt Giger. You can follow Matt's progress on his blog. Word is that he'll be at Google next month talking about EarthBrowser - more details should be available on his blog>.

Matt is selling the application for $29.95 (finally an application that isn't supported with advertising!) Steve Wozniak was apparently the 11th person to purchase a copy, which is pretty cool.

PizzaHut has launched an AIR application that allows US residents to order pizza from their desktop, rather than having to browse to the PizzaHut website. The value of such a short cut for a PizzaHut customer, at least to me, is still up in the "AIR".

Unfortunately, this application is little more than a marketing tool. When signing up for a PizzaHut.com account, you must subscribe to their email marketing messages - they've lumped the Terms of Service accept button with that checkbox. (I'm hopeful that I can unsubscribe after the first email they send me.)

When you install the PizzaHut application, it defaults to launching on startup, and also will inform you of coupons and discounts for PizzaHut. It might be useful, but I have a feeling that more AIR applications like this will start to detract from the real value of the runtime - no one is going to want desktop applications that stream in advertisements, will they?

(From Mashable)