The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.

I downloaded TweetDeck, to monitor my Twittering and such, and it looks cool. I am sort of in a widget mood, because of Apple releasing all those apps for the iPhone through their “App Store” website.

Sample Adobe AIR Apps: (Adobe AIR Market)

• DiggTop
• TweetDeck (Spaz) (Twitter) (Twhirl)
• Manage your WordPress blogs w/ AIR Press.

Do you have favorite Adobe AIR apps that you can share? Add a comment!!

Watch a video preview here!

Opera 9.5 Mobile is the first really capable mobile browser for Windows Mobile, to compete with the iPhone Safari browser. It also comes with widgets, so you can do more than just bookmark web pages and have multiple tabs, and javascript and zoom and stuff! The video describes it all pretty well. We can’t all wait another year or two for a good version of Internet Explorer for WM. Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones with many of the world’s top mobile OEMs and operators such as HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and others, so it has a growing base and good support. (I believe the street price will be around $20-30, which is about what an app goes for on a mobile device these days.)

Features

• Intuitive user interface
• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Page overview, zooming and panning
• Landscape mode
• Save Web page for future offline access
• Call phone number from Web page
• Send link as SMS/MMS
• Send image as SMS/MMS
• Small Screen Rendering™
• Password manager
• Web address input auto-completion
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text
• Opera Widgets

You can download a free beta copy here!

Go to Dewmocracy.com and vote for Supernova flavor. Three will be tasted, but only one will survive. Can you survive a supernova??

** Remember kids, soda is filled with carbon dioxide, and the more you drink, the more you help save the planet from Evil Global Warming!! Sequester some tasty, strawberry-flavored CO2 today!!!

I learned how to take a screenshot today, of web pages. You hold the home key, and click the sleep key and it snaps a shot. Cool!

Over on iPhoneFreak.com, they have instructions on how to be like Steve Jobs and use the “pinch technique”. No, it isn’t like a Vulcan neck pinch, it is moving your fingertips together and apart to zoom in and out on web pages and postscript (pdf) documents.

I’ve also downloaded some free apps from the Apple iTunes Store. I have “Showtimes”, “Twitterific”, “WeatherBug” and “Jott”. While the phone is cool and all, it is still limited to 8 Gb (in my case) and that is a lot less than my 80 Gb iPod. The interface is very nice, and intuitive, which I’m sure everyone says. Yet, with lots of use, the battery runs down pretty quickly.

I’m not sure if there are video options, so far I have only taken photos with the phone. I still have lots of concerns about granularity, and think for power users in the enterprise, Windows Mobile is not as pretty but more functional and easier to secure.

Is Iran and much of the Middle East still living in the ancient days of Ali Babba or something? This is really messed up shit. I hear lots of similar stories about girls who are married off at a young age, and then forced to have sex with their paedophiliac “husbands”. This really seems like a problem endemic to the region/religion that needs to be curbed. Rape and abuse of women and children seems more common, almost to the point of being tacitly allowed by the religious leaders (after all, it is the way of Muhammed). Disgusting. These need to be considered human rights violations. While technologically the Middle East and Asia are advanced, they have serious work to do to open their culture and grant basic rights to their people.

In this article, six people have been beheaded for “hooliganism” in the city of Sabzavar. I guess reading too much international news is giving me culture shock. All of a sudden Iowa feels very safe and normal.

We have to ask ourselves if it is reasonable to expect farming will remain viable on vast tracts of land, or if there might be a benefit to more advanced “urban” farming. If the human population continues its upward trend, and more people continue to live in metropolitan areas, will we get to a point we can’t justify continued sprawl? Will we look to build vast arcologies that house people and offer education, employment, shopping all in large vertical complexes? Efficient ecological edifices that recycle waste and include their own farming? That isn’t all so crazy. After all, jam enough people into cubicles and small apartments and you’re actually meat farming right there. Thankfully, most people aren’t cannibals… but, you can extend the concept of managing inputs and outputs and recycling to people, plants or poultry. (And this is the cow level.)

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality.

It would be nice to run Panther (10.3) even, but I only seem to have a Tiger disk here. Maybe I can find the other, but that won’t work unless I can get the system to come back up as OS 9.2. See what happens when I mess with something that works!?! More news when I have it….

** Note 1: I have successfully rebooted in OS 9.2 after zapping the PRAM a few times (cmd-option-P-R).

A woman, tied to a threatening email was fired by her employer, 1-800-Flowers, when they were made aware that the offending email originated on their email system and this woman’s computer. The employer was correct in firing her, and it wasn’t all part of God’s plan, it was her fracking fault for thinking she should say hateful, threatening things in an email and just assume it would be anonymized by the magical Internet. It won’t. It could well come back to haunt you. On top of that, how can you claim to be a Christian and even say such things. Does it say somewhere in the bible that it’s ok to be an asshole, as long as you threaten a heathen. You know what they say… If it looks like a bully, and walks like a bully and hits you over the head with a cross like a bully….

How long before I brick it? Any bets??