eBay Desktop another AIR/Flex winner

I have many friends who are in to the whole buying and selling on eBay and have made some nice additional money doing so. In the process of my research into RIA's (rich internet applications), I found a great application that is geared towards those who find the eBay world a culture of its own.

The application is called eBay Desktop and it is an AIR (www.adobe.com/air) application, built with the Flex language. In previous posts I have talked about AIR and its ability to take a web application and move it to the desktop while maintaining the data connection to the web. It also allows for offline storage of data through an SQLLite database and the ability to synchronize when connected.

The eBay application is a great example of a Rich Internet Experience without the tether of the browser. The app is cross-platform compatible, so if you run Windows, Leopard or Linux you only have to download the single app. Pretty cool! You can check out a demo video of the app and download it for free here - eBay Desktop Application. A great blog on the application can be found at http://desktop.ebay.com/blog/.

AIR version of Acrobat.com delivers a super user experience

I have been using the Acrobat.com website for a couple of months now for file sharing, presentations and especially for Buzzword, the RIA word processor built on Flex and AIR. I highly recommend the product to anyone who needs the following:

• web-based access to files
• file sharing
• .pdf creation
• shared presentations
• free web based word processor

Buzzword is a free word processor built in Flex and includes all the major features you would need including tables, image positioning, commenting, lists, headers, footers and a cool history feature.

Another cool feature of the Acrobat.com beta is the ability to download an AIR version of the program. I'll be posting about AIR more in coming posts, but for now, just know that it is a way of extending a web-based application to the desktop. In the Acrobat.com AIR app, you can minimize the application to a small widget on your desktop for access to all the products quickly. Works like having a extra drive there on your desktop-I can even drag and drop files to the widget.


So check out this great Rich Internet Application and excellent user experience at www.acrobat.com. For now the product is in a beta, so be cautious to any bugs, but I have yet to find a bug and sincerely hope this service will remain free.

Touting the Rich Internet Experience

Applications are moving to the Internet, period. I cannot see a reason why a company would not want to move their application to an Internet hosting solution. The many reasons are compelling:

• Faster delivery to market
• Single code base
• Single support mechanism
• Reduced or eliminated pirating of software
• Mobility

Even as more companies make this move to the Internet with their applications, there are still too many that believe that an Internet app is just their existing application moved from the desktop to the browser.

This blog is a study on the concept of a "Rich Internet Application". This is sometimes referred loosely as Web 2.0, but I think the term is now overused. Companies such as Adobe are offering development platforms such as Flex that are leveraging a more interactive experience and companies such as Oracle, SAP and SalesForce.com are listening.

This blog will be a collection of those sites that I find that I think leverage the concept of Rich Internet Application. My industry is insurance technology and more specifically accounting as I am a software professional who just happens to also be an accountant. I am saddened by the lack of better user experiences as I think as users, we are all owed this. I hope to potentially turn this analysis and discussion into further talking points and understand more fully the "User Experience".