The Flex developer community is pushing new ground every day. One way to keep up with the community is to install the SearchCoders/Dashboard, which makes extensive use of Adobe AIR capabilities. This Flex based application has many brilliant, community-focused features including:
- Integrated support for threaded discussion forums, chat rooms, job boards, RSS feeds, and notes
- Transparent, dynamic windows with drop shadows
- Customized window chrome
- A very advanced search system
- Extended functionality through a user login system
The search functionality is particularly useful for finding help about a particular conversation you might be interested in. For example, you can search for all posts from a particular person or a domain such as adobe.com. This is a terrific example of the type of a desktop application that can be targeted at a certain community and would have been prohibitively expensive to build with traditional desktop application building environments.
One other unique aspect to this application is that it includes a tasteful advertising component built into the user interface (see Figure 8). As Adobe AIR developers continue to build more advanced applications, it’ll be interesting to see how they support business models such as subscriptions and advertising.
Figure 8. The SearchCoder/Dashboard AIR application includes a tasteful advertising component.