Sometime back we did a post (actually more than one) on TNerd on Adobe Air applications. The posts were 10 Best Applications on Adobe Air and

As most of us use more than one product offered by Google and visit it very often, sometimes it’s not easy to juggle between windows or tabs and check information from different services. GMDesk (GMD) tries to make this task easy for us by offering an application which opens quite a few Google products in the same window and by just hitting a few keys.

GMDesk is based on Adobe’s AIR technology. Adobe AIR technology is mostly used to offer online information in a form of Desktop application.

GMDesk offers support for the following 6 Google products.

1. Gmail
2. Google Calendar
3. Google Docs
4. Google Maps
5. Google Reader
6. Picasa Web Albums

Now you do not need to open 6 different browser windows or tabs and clutter your workspace to access all these services, it lets you access all these services from a single window.

It also gives you the option of switching between services through Keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl+1 for Google Mail, Ctrl+2 for Google Calendar and so on as shown in the figure above.

The application by default shows you the login screen for Gmail; however you can change it to any of the 6 applications supported by GMD. Also, for users who are using Google Apps for Domains they can use this application for their custom domain as well.

The concept is really nice but its still needs some improvement. Something what you will immediately notice is that the font size is painfully small on Gmail the option of setting up the font size is missing.

Another thing you will notice is that this program consumes a lot of RAM. They should do something about it.

In the next version of GMD we expect to see more flexibility in terms of settings and preferences and also a more memory efficient application.

As this application is based on Adobe’s AIR technology, users who do not have Adobe AIR installed on their computers already will have to install it before trying GMDesk.

To download Adobe AIR click here and to download and install GMDesk click here.

Some other applications that are also available like GMDesk are Fluid for Mac, Bubbles and Prism for Windows, Mac and Linux which work on the similar concept but with a little more features.

If you know of anymore do lets us know by leaving a comment.

Well, I can recollect one offline service I used to use which is Microsoft Outlook that would download all the mails so that I can read it later when I am offline.

A lot of such attempts have gained momentum this year.

Few of which include:

• Google Gears Beta
• Adobe Air and
• Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Google launched Gears Beta Web Application ,which is an open source browser extension. It lets web applications provide offline services.

Advantages:

Database installation on client system
Uses data from local cache
Synchronizes data in the cache with online services.
During unavailability of network, synchronization is deferred.

To Install, Visit Google Gears Beta.

Adobe launched Air:

According to Adobe , Adobe Air is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex™, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.
In other words, Adobe Air helps users to update their information to the url once they connect to the internet.

Advantages:

Installation files can be much smaller
Allows integration of the technologies together (Flash, HTML, PDF) on a much lower level than may otherwise be feasible.
Standardized and consistent security model for Adobe AIR applications and users.

To download Adobe Air, click here.

Microsoft launched Silverlight.:

Silverlight is termed as a rich plugin for browsers. Its focus is on animation, graphics and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation.

Advantages:

Supports the display of high definition videos.
Microsoft to host silverlight media files and applications to stream large media files.

Read the overview and compatibility topics here:

Download from here :Microsoft Silverlight site