Fresh AIR Apps

This app has been submitted to freshAIRapps a number of times now so I guess it has been quite popular. The Spaz Twitter client has a history where previous versions were coded in RealBasic for specific platforms. So moving to an AIR based application platform was a no brainer.

Keyboard support is good and comprehensive although it is still lacking in some of the features of other advanced Twitter clients. Having the ability to use Markdown in your entries was a nice touch and while you can shorten URL’s it’s not as neat as Twhirl in my opinion.

Design eye

Spaz is a nice looking client and I was quite taken with the pastel colours used for the background of the Tweets. Iconography is clear and functional. I do think the help windows don’t fit with the main design and had a problem where they kept sticking to my cursor after scrolling! Lots of clicking later Spaz gave me back my cursor.

Spaz does have the ability to use custom ‘overriding’ CSS stylesheets, and the sounds are cool.

Technical eye

Spaz is open source (under a new BSD-style license) so you can get your hands dirty in the code and hack away if you want. Built using XHTML, CSS, JQuery and Spry JavaScript frameworks this applications has some neat debugging features.

Firebug lite is new to me but sounds awesome. Just add the JavaScript file into your application and you get Firebug goodness for your debugging pleasure. You can also dump out the HTML from the application to file.