Today I decided I better get into the Twitter scene, so I decided to find some AIR applications for it. To my surprise, I found 8 AIR applications for Twitter. Do you have recommendations on which one is the best?

Flash Player is an extremely popular plugin for web browsers, that's obvious. What I find amazing about it isn't that its on nearly every computer that connects to the Internet, but that it gets updated so quickly. Recent stats show that about 80% of users update to the latest version of the Flash Player within 6 months of release. Its that reason that Flash is such a compelling platform to develop on, and why Flex is really taking off.

How does that compare to other technologies? Well, a recent survey has found that 40% of people aren't using the latest version of their web browser. More at Google, and the official study paper. That's a lot of people - more than 600 million of them. Some are running the latest main version, but without the security updates, and others are running older versions of the browser. (For eg. 92.2% of Firefox users were using Firefox 2, though Firefox 3 is available.) Updated by Mike: I misread the Google blog post referenced above.

How does this affect you? Well, with Flash Player, you can be pretty sure that 80% of people will be using the latest version within 6 months of release. As a developer, that means you can use all the newest features right away, without having to wait for users to update. That's very different than if you're developing apps in the browser.

Desktop Keeley, the AIR application built for the Sun newspaper in the UK, "has beaten previous download figures for Sun apps after only three days" according to this article.

There's nothing like a lingerie model dancing on your desktop for driving downloads.

Flex has seen a lot of uptake by large enterprise companies since its release. Philips, Taleo, n2n, Oracle and many others are Flex customers. Today EMC, makers of Documentum, announced that they're launching a new client based on Flex.

From the press release: “We have been known as having the best platform but not the best client,” says Karin Ondricek, an EMC senior manager for product marketing. “Our client has been a weak spot. But with the new client, people are immediately going to be able to pick it up and know how to work it.” Sounds like I'm not the only one that's been frustrated by the UI for Documentum.

The article has a few screenshots of the Flex applications that have been built.

Earlier this week the eBay desktop was downloaded for the 1 millionth time. That's a great accomplishment for one of the first AIR apps that's been developed.

That application was originally built by a summer intern of mine, Charles Bihis, who is now working at Adobe in Seattle. He developed the initial AS 3 APIs and a very earlly alpha version of eBay Desktop. The team at effectiveUI took the project on after a conversation I had with them in a bus in San Francisco after the first Adobe component developer summit run by Ted Patrick. They're the ones who have made it look so great and added most of the functionality that it has today.

Congrats Alan on the great success. The project would be dead without your great support.

I've had quite a few Flex apps come to my attention lately that I haven't had time to blog about. Here's a list of them:

Nibea - Nibea is "a website tool for creative people". The editor is built with Adobe Flex.
Amazon's video on demand service is powered by Flex and Flash Media Server.
The BBC launched an AIR application for the upcoming Olympics. No one noticed because we were all too busy with Desktop Keeley.
HP launched a new application in beta called Logo Maker, built by the talented team at mediaRAIN.

Sex sells. No doubt about it. Last week's strip poker story received 3,000+ reads, while the story about the geek cruise received only a few hundred. This story should get a few thousand at least. The Sun newspaper in the UK has created an AIR application called Desktop Keeley, which does two things really. One is an RSS reader - it provides news and sports information to your desktop, along with updates about their Page 3 girl.

The other aspect of the application is a Page 3 girl herself - Keeley. Using some petty cool transparent video, Keeley will come out every few minutes onto your desktop wearing lingerie. See the image below for an example.

The application was created by the team at Glue London. The transparent video is actually really cool - there are some neat ones like when she writes on your desktop or when she shoots your monitor that are pretty cool.

Via Andrew Shorten. Nice find Andrew. And I did install this for research purposes, as you suggested. :)

TechCrunch is running a story about Tokbox, who today released an Adobe AIR desktop client that allows users on Windows, Mac and Linux to do video chatting, absolutely free.

The video quality on the application is really good, as is the audio quality (after a few quick minutes testing it at work - not sure what it would be like over the Internet tubes, but the local network tubes were good).

The desktop AIR application is identical to the web based application that they have online, which is really well done.

The only problem I had was when I installed the application, it did prompt me to import my contacts from other IM clients, which was nice. But it would be even better if all these IM companies shared my information with one and another. That's not a complaint about Tokbox per say, just IM in general, though its something that they're going to have to deal with.

Mercedes Benz launched a new Flex powered website for their USA page. I never visited the old site, but the new site looks great, and has a nice application to build your own Benz.

Most car manufacturers use Flash for their website. A quick look shows Toyota, Honda, Ford, Mazda, GM, and VW (thanks Michael Chaize!) are all using Flash on their sites.

Yesterday we sent out the latest issue of the RIA Buzz Newsletter from Adobe, and received an email from one of the subscribers asking us to mention his RIA Cruise in the next issue of the newsletter. Of course we will, but I couldn't wait that long to blog about it. This is the first RIA cruise that I've heard about, but hopefully not the last.

The cruise leaves Miami on Monday, February 9th and returns on Friday, February 13th. You'll visit 3 cities (on 3 different islands) while on the cruise: Grand Bahama Island, Nassau and Great Stirrup Cay.

Inside rooms start at $345 per person (dbl occupancy) for the 5 day cruise. Balcony rooms are $595.

RIA Adventure.com has all the details, including how to sign up the cruise.