Get Your Twitter Tweets Over the AIR
I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with Twitter ever since it first exploded into the just before the SXSW conference this past March. I get into it for a while, then drop it for a while. Mostly, I’ve been using the service’s web interface or IconFactory’s Twitterrific application for the Mac desktop.
Well, here’s a new one that shows some promise. It’s Tweetr, a Twitter client for the Adobe Integrated Runtime platform. It has support for a camera (if your laptop has one) and there are different interfaces for viewing all Tweets or just replies.
Tweetr and other AIR apps run on top of Adobe’s proprietary platform, so you’ll need to download AIR to your desktop in order to use these applications. Adobe’s runtime lets developers use Flash and JavaScript to create desktop apps that look and feel more like web-based apps. It’s also a very young platform, so the ecosystem of available apps is — shall we say — underpopulated. But AIR applications behave the same way on both Macs and PCs (and Linux machines, too, since Adobe is working on an AIR runtime for the OS).
For the most part, AIR apps perform just like desktop apps, though they have a "webbish" look and feel. The interface elements seem less like the traditional Windows or Mac OS skin. Instead, they are more akin to Flash applications that run in the browser.
