madhavonline.com

Adobe AIR is a great platform for accessing Web Apps from your desktop, there are some great Adobe AIR applications are out there and the list is growing. Google web apps are so popular that everyone uses at least some of them, the list includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Maps etc, but there is no way to access these apps from your desktop so far.

GMDesk is a Adobe AIR application that allows you to access Google Suite of applications from your desktop. It supports Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Picasa and Google Maps.

Icon Generator is a little application that lets you generate a CS3 or Web 2.0 style icon, only 3 step- Pick color, type characters and click Create Icon. It allows you to create just create 4 different sizes of the icon. Icon Generator is based on Adobe AIR apps, so you will need Adobe AIR Runtime to install it.

Flaws

• Only 4 lines of text support
• No option to change text or design.
• No option to create custom icons

Advantages

• Create Icons in just 3 steps
• Wide range of colors to chose from.
• CS3 and Web 2.0 Style logo

Flump is a Adobe AIR application that lets you download Flickr photos of any Flickr user to your hard drive.

Enter the flickr username or ID and specify the location in your hard drive to store photos and start flump. If you don’t know your Flickr ID you can get it http://www.flickr.com/.

For more information on Abode Air Products see here

You just need to have a little knowledge about Command Prompt and have WinRAR installed.

1. Gather all the files that you wish to hide in a folder anywhere in your PC (make it in C:\hidden - RECOMMENDED).
2. Now, add those files in a RAR archive (e.g. secret.rar). This file should also be in the same directory (C:\hidden).
3. Now, look for a simple JPEG picture file (e.g. logo.jpg). Copy/Paste that file also in C:\hidden.
4. Now, open Command Prompt (Go to Run and type ‘cmd‘). Make your working directory C:\hidden.
5. Now type: “COPY /b logo.jpg + secret.rar output.jpg” (without quotes) - Now, logo.jpg is the picture you want to show, secret.rar is the file to be hidden, and output.jpg is the file which contains both.
6. Now, after you have done this, you will see a file output.jpg in C:\hidden. Open it (double-click) and it will show the picture you wanted to show. Now try opening the same file with WinRAR, it will show the hidden archive .

3D Effects — Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity.?Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Now, you would be able to easily move DisplayObjects in 3D with Actionscript.Custom Filters and Effects — Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.

Advanced Text Layout — Fully supported Bi-Directional Text Support. A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Enhanced Drawing API — Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Visual Performance Improvements — Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration.?By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

Dynamic sound generation — Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object

File Reference runtime access — Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server. You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

GPU Compositing — Hardware compositing takes advantage of the tremendous memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU, reducing the load on the CPU, and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications, resulting in more fluid, realistic and responsive user experiences.

GPU Blitting — Paint SWFs into the browser using your video card by choosing this new HTML parameter. Your content can run faster and give you the freedom to do more.?Developers can enable or disable GPU surfacing to perform hardware blitting for each SWF within a web page without having to recompile the SWF.