Adobe products like Photoshop, Acrobat Professional, Flash and Dreamwaver have set industrial standards in their respective categories.image And who can miss the universally popular Adobe PDF Reader? But there’s still more to Adobe than these. One of the latest projects by Adobe to hit the Internet is AIR, a new phenomenon that has taken the geeky world by storm and is expected to catch steam among normal users as well. Adobe AIR has been out for some months already and has been covered thoroughly by many other tech blogs; this is just a quick know-how of this tool in case you haven’t heard of it yet.

So, what’s this AIR?
AIR is a free, cross-platform runtime environment that will enable you to run web applications as standalone desktop tools. Didn’t quite get the idea? Let’s suppose you’re an active eBay seller / buyer. Everyday you fire up your browser, open the eBay website, sign in to your account and then start your transactions. Needless to say, this takes quite some time. Wouldn’t it be much better if you could control your eBay account directly from your desktop? With Adobe AIR, you really CAN make this happen! Simply install AIR on your computer and then download the AIR-based eBay Desktop client. After installation, you will have an eBay icon right on your desktop. Open it, add your account and you’re ready to go!


eBay Desktop

And it’s not just eBay; AIR-based desktop installers for many online accounts, social networks and tracking tools have been popping up every now and then. Today with AIR, you can do anything from updating your Twitter status to following your Google Analytics stats, and from managing your Google Reader feeds to tracking the recent activities of your online buddies (with FriendFeed), right from your desktop. AIR has been out for a few months and can only grow from where it is today. Many tech blogs have mentioned some useful AIR applications which you can use. Here are but just a few of these posts (links to the AIR apps for the web services mentioned above can also be found in these posts):

15 Useful Adobe AIR Applications – Teknobites

8 Adobe AIR Apps that Don’t Suck – MakeUseOf

Top 7 Useful AIR Applications for Bloggers – Killer Tech Tips

List of Adobe AIR Applications – Adobe AIR Website

Note
1.All Adobe AIR apps have a .air extension.
2.If you are unfamiliar with web services like Twitter or FriendFeed, do look them up in Google or Wikipedia. I will be briefly covering them soon. :)