Adobe's popular AIR runtime is gaining more and more fans, and with that, far more applications than ever that cover a broad spectrum of tools. From fun applications that let you order pizza from your desktop to applications that let you track your investments online and off , the entire spectrum is out there, and this guide should help you find at least one or two that fit your life.
Financial and Productivity
Agile Agenda - Helps with project management, letting you schedule and assign tasks, assigning priorities and more.
Google Calendar RSS Invoice Creator - If you use Google Calendar to track your work on projects, you can use this app to parse your RSS feed and create invoices for your time to send to your clients.
Klok - A tool for freelance workers to manage their billable hours to clients. Also gives you tools for visualizing what you spend the majority of your time on, managing your projects and more.
NASDAQ Market Reply - A powerful tool allowing you to look over the history of any security and study its trends.
Portfolio Viewer - View multiple investment portfolios, and you can view them offline as all information is stored locally.
StockQ - Start streaming stock prices to your desktop without having to belong to any other sites. Set refresh intervals from 1 sec to 5 minutes, you have complete control.
Wicked Stickies! - Make post-it-like stickers where you can put down notes to help with your GTD activities, even set them with an expiration date so they won't clutter up your desk.
Microblogging & Lifestreaming
Alert Thingy - Lets you receive updates from FriendFeed, post images to Flickr and send & receive Twitter updates.
Posty - Allows you to post to Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter.
Pownce - As opposed to all of the Twitter apps from third parties, Pownce comes from the mothership itself. Send and receive updates to the service from your desktop.
Snitter - A Twitter client with auto-refresh, audio cues of new messages, easy integration of replies and more.
Spaz - An open source Twitter client with multiple themes and user-defined CSS.
Tumbleweed - An AIR app for posting to your Tumblr blog. Lots of extra features like posting whatever images you have on your clipboard for easier photo adding.
Tweetr - Allows you to follow Twitter, take pictures with your webcam and has a drag-and-drop interface for file transfers to your friends.
Twhirl - Arguably the most popular way to access Twitter outside of the site itself. Auto refreshes, cross-posts to Jaiku & Pownce, sends files up to 10 mb in size and a whole lot more.
Miscellaneous
CL Desktop - A lot of people love craigslist, but it isn't always the most user-friendly site to browse. This AIR app helps make it more visual and easier to navigate.
DiggTop - Check out the current top stories on Digg in one handy interface.
EarthBrowser - Browse the planet to check out the weather, current earthquake data, import and export KML files and more.
eBayDesktop - A cleaner, more concise way to browse and shop eBay all from one interface window.
Google Analytics - All of the features you've come to expect from Google Analytics plus the ability to access multiple accounts from one interface.
Pizza Hut Shortcut - Now US residents can order your favorite pizza from Pizza Hut right on your computer desktop. Make sure to check out our Pizza Hut Shortcut review.
ReadAir - An application allowing you to read your Google Reader articles outside of the browser. Though it has a distinct Mac OS X feel, it will also work in Windows.
Music
AOL Top 100 Videos - Easy access to the most popular music videos in AOL's music area right from your own desktop.
Finetune - Gives you access to your Finetune profile, playlists from the site and allows you to start building with information from your iTunes.
MuxMaster - Though it has lost its ability to download from MuxTape, this is a great way to browse and listen your favorite MuxTapes. Also interesting to see this is built without the use of an API.
Pandora Desktop - Gives you the ability to control the Pandora music discovery service from your desktop. You can also check out our own Paul Glazowski's full review of the Pandora desktop beta for more information.
Photos & Video
Flump - Short for "Flickr Dump", this app will download all the public photos from a Flickr account.
FotoBooth - Take pictures with your webcam, apply filters and directly upload them to your Flickr account.
mooFlair - Lets you search multiple video sites such as YouTube and Metacafe, create playlists from them, and if you need to watch them offline, you can download them to your local system.
Snoto Photo - A browser for your Flickr photos with slideshows and more.