Flash 10.1 introduces several new key features including video hardware acceleration (only available in Flash for Windows), better mobility support including smartphone and other Internet-devices support and additional option for media delivery. Users interested in installing the new Flash Player version should note that it is not the final release but a community preview which is mainly aimed at developers.

This public prerelease is an opportunity for developers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content. Consumers can try the beta release of Flash Player 10.1 to preview hardware acceleration of video on supported Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks. You can also help make Flash Player better by visiting all of your favorite sites, making sure they work the same or better than with the current player. We definitely want your feedback to help improve the final version, expected to ship in the first half of 2010.

Interested users can take a look at the announcement over at Adobe Labs, read the release notes or watch Flash Player 10 demonstrations online.

The second major release today is the release of Adobe Air 2.0 Beta which also comes with many enhancements over the current Adobe Air release. This includes a long list of features like the following:

* Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
* Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
* Support for native code integration.
* The ability to open a file with its default application.
* Multi-touch and gesture support.
* New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
* Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
* Global error handling.
* Improved cross-platform printing
* Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Like Flash Player 10.1 Adobe Air 2 is a beta release that is not aimed at the general Internet community but at developers who want to test the new technology or adapt their products to make use of these new features and options. Those users can take a closer look at the release notes and the announcement of Adobe Air 2.0 which contains follow up links to get started.

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The user needs to authenticate the application at the first startup after entering the Flickr username or email address. The process is painless and should take less than a minute to complete. It does involve logging into Flickr with the default web browser to allow Destroy Flickr access to the user data.

Destroy Flickr comes with all the functionality needed to manage a Flickr account from the computer desktop. It can be used to view uploaded photos, download uploaded photos, take a detailed look at specific photos, look at photos of contacts or the popular category at Flickr.

The application uses a very slick interface with lots of effects that look really great but do not slow down the application. It’s main use on the other hand is definitely the upload and download capabilities that are provided which makes it more comfortable to work with photos without having to open the Flickr website.

Destroy Flickr needs Adobe Air installed on the computer system. This does make it a cross-platform application on the other hand.

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ZFlick is just one of those applications. It has been designed for Adobe Air and can be executed from the local computer system after startup. The interface displays just a search form at the beginning which can be used to initiate a search for photos at Flickr.

The application will then display 50 thumbnails of photos that are related to the search term entered by the user with the option to browse additional pages with the controls on top. The exact number of matches and pages is displayed next to the controls to give the user an overview of the photos that have been found.

A click on a thumbnail will load a larger view of the photo in the application. It is from here possible to open the photo on Flickr directly or drag and drop it to download it to the local computer system. A left-right click will return to the thumbnail view again.

The photos that can be downloaded are not of the largest size which is really the only criticism that users could have. An option to change the default photo size that gets downloaded would be appreciated.

ZFlick requires Adobe Air which makes it a compatible with different operating systems including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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Sadly the app is not completely free. I usually only look at headlines because I don’t have a huge amount of time, and for that it is perfect. You can click around in the various sections and read excerpts and titles. You can also read the main page articles and the business articles for free. You will need a subscription though to access the full content on the other pages. There is also a feed reader type “Latest News” section, which you can view freel for all the breaking news.

If you’re already a subscriber the whole app is completely free. If you don’t have a Times subscription yet, you can subscribe for $3.5 a week. I think this is a small price to pay for the NYT, especially if you live anywhere off the US coastline. If you enjoy reading newspapers, but you don’t have the time to grab a copy each day, I think the New York Times reader is a great application.

(via Lifehacker)

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All you need to do, is fire up the application, select your style (Adobe style, or Web 2.0 star style), enter your text, up to four letters, select a background color and click generate. The shading is done extremely well, no matter what color you choose your icon will look good. This really is a great way to create file extension icons, especially if you use a lot like php, css, js and so on, you can get much better stuff the the original system ones.

The only thing I don’t like about the app is how it saves icons, more specifically, the naming. It generates four files with the names of “icon_16.png” for example, where “icon” is NOT the name you entered. This way, if you want to save a new icon, you need to get the old ones out of the way because they will be overwritten. I have no idea why the icons are not named after the name you enter, this would make saving and handling of these files much easier. Otherwise a great little app, give it a go!

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Once you install the app, you’ll see a stylish search bar, just enter your term and press enter. A really cool loading animation can be seen as the 50 pics pop into place, and when done, you can go through them by clicking any image to show in a bigger view.

Downloading is done by simply drag and dropping a large image, and is instantaneous, since by the time you see the image it is cached, or downloaded to a temporary file anyway. This is a beautiful application to help you browse for images/inspiration, I mean just the app itself is inspirational. However, there are some things that could make the app even better.

There are basically two things I could use, the most needed is the ability to see the image’s license if any. This would enable me to quickly use the image for a blog post or a web page, without this I need to check on site. The other option that would be nice is to enable drag and drop from the icon view. Sometimes when I’m looking for images I just drop things into a “bin” without checking, if it looks right it’s in, I’ll sort it out later. A sort of mass download option would also be nice, where you click on the 10 images you need and download them. Another feature which would make navigation easier is the ability to list by name/tag, or even better, to narrow down results using tags. A great application otherwise, it’s things that look like this that give me inspiration personally.

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Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use Wordpress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

The bigger problem I had is that it took me 10 tries to get it to display a report for my blogHack Your Day, which now has 380 links. The bar just froze at a number between 75% and 82% and refused to move. I would like to add however that the actual application did not freeze up, which is something I rarely see.

For those of you who have great big blogs this is a bummer, I mean gHacks has well over 5,000 posts now, that’s just 5,000+ links for the posts, so generation would probably not work at all. Despite all this, I would welcome any additions and improvements as this would be the tool for a lot of bloggers! Also, if you know any similar tools, especially ones with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit can you let us know in the comments?

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A complex activity on the other hand adds due dates, reminders, tags, context, additional users and contents to the basic information. Each activity can be made up of sub-activities.

Contacts can be invited from various sources including Konolive accounts but also external sources like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN or Plaxo. Keep in mind that the login credentials have to be supplied to be able to do so.

KonoLive can be an interesting alternative to other GTD software programs if the users do not mind the use of Adobe Air. The software has been designed with ease and mind and it is indeed easy and comfortable to work with other users in KonoLive.

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If you’ve already used a previous version, the most prominent change you’ll notice is the UI differences. I am not a huge fan of changing a UI that already looks and feels good, but they did a great job here, everything is a bit bigger, easier to use, and logically arranged into tabs. My favorite new visual feature can be observed right here in a project’s summary menu, where there is a big “Actual hours vs estimate” representation with a horizontal bar filling up as you go along. Visual stuff like this helps me tremendously, it instills more “panic”, so I will probably get a move on if I see the estimate being overshot soon.

Of course this isn’t a hugely useful feature otherwise, but some great time tracking and usability issues have been addressed as well. You can now reorder your projects using drag and drop, which was something I really missed, now you can push subtasks between main tasks, so if you work in a project oriented workspace (as opposed to a client oriented one), you can easily move subtasks here and there. Another great feature implemented is better exporting capabilities. If you click on a summary you can now simply drag and drop an Excel icon onto the desktop to export to a file (along with comments), but if Excel is open, you can simply drop it in there to open it right away. So simple, yet so elegant, I love it!

Apart from these, smaller issues were addressed, for example renaming was a bit clunky in previous versions, it wasn’t updated automatically, you had to click update for it to get updated, which is not a huge thing, but having it all done without needing to commit the changes can save you a boatload of time when adding a lot of projects.

I’m really hoping a lot more development goes into the app, as I can think of a lot of features that could be helpful. I would welcome some client management options. Since I organize Klok projects on a client basis, it would be great if contact people for all subtasks would be the same as the contact for the main entry by default. I would also have use for a sort of client management page separate from tasks where I could assign a project to a client and the appropriate structure would be created. A wonderful feature implemented is the option to give a project code to a project. I actually do this anyway, so inputting it here too is a great help, but it would be even better if you could set some rules to create these numbers automatically. I know its a long shot, but I actually manage my projects in a mysql database because I have a project management site for my clients, so exporting and interacting with mysql would be awesome, but I think I personify the one and only unit of demand for this feature.

All in all I would recommend Klok to anyone, freelancers, young mothers staying at home, office workers, anyone can benefit from a little time tracking, maybe only for fun to see what you waste time on? On another note, does any of you know if there will be a paid version of Klok? The download link says “Free personal edition”, although there is no payment option. I am guessing there are some plans to add extra features later, anyone have some news on this?

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Since GMDesk is making use of Adobe Air it requires that the Adobe application is installed on the computer system before it can be installed as well. The Adobe Air application basically displays all included Google apps on the desktop. It usually starts with the login screen of Google Mail unless the user picks a different starting service in the program’s options.

GMDesk can remember the username and password that has been used to log into one of the Google apps. Once logged in all other Google apps require no additional login process which means that it takes only a short time to switch applications.

Applications can be selected from the top menu or by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL [1-6] to bring the desired application to the front. There is no way to display more than one at the same time but every application is active and can be activated easily which feels like switching tabs in browsers when using several Google services at once.

GMDesk is a rather resource hungry Adobe Air application, it us using more than 60 Megabytes of computer memory and more than 70 Megabytes of virtual memory after login, that’s quite a bit. It can be run on all operating systems that support Adobe Air which includes Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Mac.

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Bubbles is a Windows only ‘browser’ which lets you create site specific ‘bubbles’ to run in the system tray.

It can actually be very useful for any web service you find yourself constantly using, but as of yet has no kind of desktop access. SlimTimer was designed to take advantage of it specifically, but it works pretty well with a lot of other websites as well.

Really it’s just the fact you can minimise these ‘bubbles’ to the system tray which makes it useful for me, if it wasn’t for that then you can get a lot of the functionality through other means.

The problem is a lot of the Bubbles functionality overlaps what other programs I use already do, but that might not be the case for you.

It does have some useful extensions such as notifications for Google services like Google Reader, Gmail and Facebook. You can also drag and drop photos to be uploaded to Flickr, a handy one if this is a service you use.

Personally I don’t know how this is going to compete against technologies such as Adobe AIR and Google Gears and maybe even Mozilla Prism. However the simplicity of Bubbles may be its strong point, and plenty of developer tools and resources are provided on the site.

Do any of you use this?

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Luckily Adobe Air was built exactly for these needs and a nice person has made us a desktop version of Meebo, called Meebone, which acts exactly the same way, but doesn’t have the rooms, banners, and stuff that have made Meebo a bit less appealing to me nowadays. There’s really not much more to say about this application, log on and use Meebo as you would normally.

To me this is probably the first application which shows the power of Adobe Air. Meebo is a fully browser based application and is taken off your browser seamlessly with it. This means that now people like me who love a browser based apps, but sometimes need desktop power can enjoy the apps they love.

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Once you enter and verify your information, you can immediately access some basic information about your profile, latest added, and whole photo database. You can choose to view a load of your photos on one page, or just go one by one. A skew is randomly applied to each pic, which some people will find cool (I do), others won’t be thrilled, but it’s small enough not to matter if you don’t like it.

What I love about Destroy Flickr is that it gives you an easy way to download an upload files. Just punch up the upload menu at the bottom, or drag and drop pics into the download box in the corner. It also syncs to your account with the push of a button, so if you upload stuff from the main page you can still quickly refresh.

You can also add more profiles and seamlessly navigate between them, reaching all the functions for both accounts. You can view your friends’ photos, take a look at the interestingness, in other words you can use it to discover as well. Overall I’m quite pleased with this app, if you need a change from Flickr, it may be the place to go.

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FreshAIRapps is a breath of fresh air (haha) on the web, I see so many sites out there just automatically aggregating content and posting 5% content and 95% adsense. This website does have some ads, but what the real value of it is that the writer actually takes the time to try each app. Clicking on an app will take you to its page where you can see a short description and a look from different angles, the design eye and the technical eye.

What’s great is that he actually manages to write negative stuff. I use about 5 apps that he showcases and he has found the exact problems I have, and this is what makes freshAIRapps such a valuable site. In addition the pics are wonderful and the content I hope will be increasing as AIR apps come out. If you’re in on the hype definitely check out this page!

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Twhirl is an Air app that enables you to use Twitter from the desktop, making status updates a breeze. I have been staying off the Twitter bandwagon so far, but I decided to give it a go, and Twhirl enables me to very quickly send updates on what I’m up to. It resides on the system tray and simply click on it, write your update and press enter at the end, that’s all.

This was all the functionality I was looking for at the moment, but Twhirl does offer a lot more. You can look at replies, friends and followers, directs, favorites and more. You can also choose one of many themes that come with the app to blend it into your desktop. If you are looking for a simple app to do your Twittering work take a look at Twhirl, it’s all I was looking for!

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Each project consists of a name and a color. That’s the minimal constellation. Additional data like contact names and email addresses can be added and sub projects can be created. Each project and sub project is listed in the left column and can be accessed with a double-click to change data, add sub projects or write comments on previous time entries.

The time of a project will be tracked when the user drags the project into the Currently Working On area of the application or by clicking on the Work On button in the project’s detail view.

Instead of tracking the time in real time it is possible to drag projects into the weekly view and edit the time manually. A double-click leads to that option which also offers access to the comment function.

Automatic time tracking cannot get better than this. The application is very responsive and it is easy to create new projects or sub projects. Reports are saved in Excel format which is also excellent.

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WebKut displays the websites in its own browser window and it is possible to navigate websites or use search engines for instance. I was not able to find any limitations yet and all capture requests that I started completed successfully with virtually no delay. Capturing the Ghacks homepage created a 1044×2800 jpg image with a size of 2.5 Megabytes.

The output format can be changed in the program’s options. Available are the two image formats jpg and png plus the Adobe PDF format. The image ratio and image quality can also be defined there. The ratio defines the width and heights in proportion to the original website, a ratio of 50 would reduce the width and height by 50%.

The main problem of WebKut is that it is not integrated in the browser. It’s far more comfortable to capture a website in the browser directly than to use an Adobe Air application, unless you are a masterful copy and paste user.

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The first thing that I noticed about Mooflair was its excellent design and responsiveness. I had some troubles finding the video search option, it’s a bit hidden under the RSS menu. Mooflair does not offer a full video search yet which is rather unfortunate. It provides access to all video portal RSS feeds which means to several dozen videos in certain categories like Video Games, Music and HD.

Local videos can be played as well. The ability to download videos is a nice feature but more or less a default feature in every video player of that kind. Mooflair does offer enough videos so that it does not get boring to fast but it is kept back by the lack of a full site search.

Another excellent feature is the ability to add videos to the playlist which can be filled with videos from all supported video portals. Those playlists can be saved and played at a later time. It is even possible to mix local and online videos into one playlist. Mooflair has everything it takes to become an excellent Adobe Air application, the only missing piece is the full video search on all portals.

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I mentioned earlier that Adobe Air is needed to run Alert Thingy which means that you need to install it before you can install Alert Thingy. Some might think that I’m still living in the medieval Internet because I do not have a Twitter or Friendfeed account. It merely meant that I had no way of testing the application further, at least not the parts that needed an account at the two services.

I read at Techcrunch however that all information were displayed in one window in contrast to Twirl which displayed the information in two windows.

A nice addition is the tiny url generator which surely comes in handy when posting messages to Twitter. The Flickr upload was designed to be easy as well. As far as I can tell only one image can be uploaded at a time but that one can be dropped into the Alert Thingy interface. I suppose it’s a great application if you use those services.

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By default neither the active nor old to-dos are shown in the interface, this can be changed with one mouse click however. A reminder can be set for each to-do which will alert the user after some time has passed.

The interface does not stay on top all the time and there is unfortunately no configuration menu at all. You cannot set transparency levels for instance or make the application stay on top. What I really would like to see in a new version would be support for hotkeys, transparency and a sticky interface that can be set to be always on top.

Are you using a different to-do list ? Let me know about it, I’m really looking for a simple one with a good functionality and low memory consumption.

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