Grant Skinner established himself as a Flash guru many years ago, and his design firm is well on its way to doing the same as an Adobe AIR application developer, as evidenced by their creation of DiggTop. This application demonstrates many advantages to the Adobe AIR runtime, including how well Adobe AIR applications can interface with web APIs such as the Digg API to create highly customized user interfaces.
Some of the features that really captured my attention include:
- A branded user interface that has the look and feel of the Digg website
- An integrated, customized video player (see Figure 5)
- Automatic slideshow creation by scanning image links within the source article (see Figure 6)
- A self-updating mechanism that will download automatically a new version of this application
- An advanced settings dialog box, which allows for intuitive filtering of articles and videos as well as control over notifications (see Figure 7)
Figure 5. DiggTop includes support for videos posted to Digg using the built-in video player.
Figure 6. In addition to video, DiggTop extracts images from articles and creates dynamically generated slideshows.
Figure 7. Customize your Digg feeds to your heart's content and even create your own keyword filters.
DiggTop packs an incredible amount of functionality into a small amount of visual real estate (roughly 515 pixels wide by 300 pixels high). DiggTop looks like a finished product, but I suspect that Grant Skinner is going to push the limits even further with the new drag-and-drop support in Adobe AIR beta.