Let’s AIR it out a bit

Apr 23rd, 2008 | By Bill Vincent | Category: Technology

I know, I should be shot for that title. I’m used to it, I’ve been playing Call of Duty 4 and if there is one thing I’m very good at, it’s getting shot. Frequently.

In my last post, I waxed whiney about the weakness of offerings for Adobe Air. What I see the most of is applets for interfacing with things that already have interfaces and apparently silly games and widgets, but I got to thinking. This is a pretty new thing. Perhaps I’m expecting too much this early in the game. The developers are just getting their teeth into this thing, and once I put on a new perspective, I started to see that ‘water testing’ looks to be the name of the game. That in mind, let’s look a at a few more AIR apps that show what can be done with these new tools.

iSpy

iSpy is very new, only published a few days ago by Rich Tretola, but I played with it for quite a while. Available as a desktop app, iSpy accesses your webcam and monitors the feed for movement levels per your settings, then captures a still image and saves it to your harddisk at 2-3 second intervals until the movement goes back below the threshold. Home security, babysitter monitor, the possibilities are many. I’m thinking of pointing it across the desk into the master bath so I can determine which of our dogs has been pooping on the rug in front of the sink while I’m away at the work-place.

Some features I would like to see would be the ability to run hidden, or at least minimized, and the power to specify the folder to save the caps in.

File Furnace

Nicely showing the power of tools formerly reserved for your browser is File Furnace, a file-destroyer that purports to permanently delete unwanted files.

It has no features, and a rather annoying noise of something “burning” that cannot be shut off, but I submit it for your consideration nonetheless. GetDataBack, a rather powerful data-recovery tool, was unable to restore files I “incinerated”.

Snapshooter

Another RIA that displays the power potential of AIR is this offer from Safari Development. Enter any valid URL into Snapshooter and grab a snapshot of the page. To me this shows valid movement toward truly linking your desk to the rest of the web.

[tags]Adobe AIR, RIA, web 2.0[/tags]