A Perfect Application for AIR

At work, we stream an internet radio station called WOXY which plays a really great selection of independent rock. Since there's always new stuff coming on, I like to keep tabs on who I'm listening to when I hear something I like. They have a pop-out playlist on their website, but it's inconvenient (or actually impossible) to keep a browser window open when I'm doing Flex development/debugging/etc. So - I whipped together a mini AIR app that just sits in the taskbar and keeps an updated playlist. We're hosting the application on my company's blog, and if anybody is interested in the source I'd be happy to post that too. You can also check out this discussion on WOXY's Forum.  The feedback has been very positive so far, although some people are having a really hard time getting AIR installed.

I was very impressed with this experience in the ease of putting together a taskbar based application. There aren't as many resources out there yet for AIR as there are for Flex, but I found most of the syntax fairly concise and intuitive. The major downside is AIR's memory footprint. This obscenely simple application takes up 20-25 Mb of RAM!  I've been reading similar complaints about other AIR applications too. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release...

Note: I built this app for my windows box and haven't tested it on a mac... because OSX doesn't really have a taskbar, it may have some issues.

Share: