Fresh AIR Apps

Grant Skinner is better known for being a Flash guru and running a successful development agency. He has developed a really nice AIR app for monitoring the social news website Digg.com (that’s D I G G dot com – see Diggnation for relevance!). I’m a big fan of Digg and like their cut down version the runs on the iPhone, it’s simpler yet still gives me the information I need.

In a very small footprint the application shows you 10 items at a time for each main category. News, Videos, Images. Through a very complete settings menu you can tailor which categories or keywords you want to see stories for within each main category. This selection then gets stored locally so you don’t loose it upon restart. There is a notification section within settings where you can ask to be notified when an article matches a specific criteria. This could be keywords or a number of Diggs.

What is super cool though is the ability to play videos and see images directly within the AIR app. When there is more that one image attached to a story DiggTop treats them like a slideshow, or mousing over direct selection. The video includes a full player with volume and progress bar.

Overall this is one application that brings a mixture of content very successfully to the desktop. What would take many page selections on the Digg site is delivered with a professional, integrated style that you could only achieve with this kind of application.

This is one application that should stay routed on your desktop.

Design eye

Professional style with a hint of Digg, especially in the typography, make this app look finished. Fonts are small but readable and the two paned interface is a great design cue. The subtle arrow that links the two panels together while also pointing out the currently view story is really nice.

Technical eye

Built using Flash and the Digg API.