We’ve mentioned previously that Adobe Air allows you to bring some of the great functionality of Web 2.0 to your desktop. Now, Google has released Google Reader on Adobe Air and is calling it ReadAir.

The goal of the application is to allow you all of the great features you enjoy in the Google Reader in your web browser while still on the desktop and even offer access to your important RSS feeds while you’re off line.

ReadAir is currently an OS X Themed application and feels in many ways like a normal app and not one running on Adobe Air. Although the application is still at version .1 I wanted to see how things worked.

Performance

Speed and performance is always important for applications connected to the internet. I was surprised by how well ReadAir connected me to my Google Reader account and pulled down all of my feeds and information. Clicking from one article to the next populated instantly and at times had faster results than what I am use to on the web. I assume this is related to the application pulling all the feeds at once and not waiting for me to load them individually into my browser.

Still a bit buggy

Despite the fast performance ReadAir is not without its bugs. For some reason assigning a tag to a feed doesn’t work correctly and always assigns the feed the first tag/folder on my subscription list. I tried this a number of times and could not get it to work correctly, but as I mentioned this is still an early .1 release so bugs are expected.

Features still under development

While ReadAir connects you to your Google Reader feeds it still lacks some of the features you’ve grown to love with the browser based RSS Reader.

The ReadAir site lists these features as still being in development:

1. Continuation (Allow users to view more than 20 items per feed)
2. Offline mode
3. Keyboard shortcuts
4. Windows XP/Vista and custom themes
5. Unread count in Mac doc icon

But, despite its shortfalls the initial release of ReadAir shows a lot of promise and may already work well enough for your daily RSS reading needs.

If you’re not using Google Reader, what RSS Feed Reader do you currently use? Let us know in the comments, and what makes it great!

- tip from lifehacker

The folks over at macworld.com have written a detailed description about the old and new rules you should consider when purchasing a Mac.

One of the main themes throughout the article is that the new Intel Macs have really changed the way we should think about Apple Computers. I agree completely with the article.

In the past I was always impressed with the capabilities of Apple OS X and the standard applications that were included with the system but since Apple has moved to Intel processors I’ve purchased 5 new Macs.

The Intel Chips in Apple computers provides best of both worlds for users and really makes it difficult to justify NOT buying a Mac.

I believe the continual increase in market share that Apple has seen since moving to x86 processors also supports this claim.

So, if you’re thinking about buying a new Apple Computer, Read the macworld.com article on the new rules for buying a Mac.

As many of you may have heard, HBO has joined the iTunes store. While all of HBO original television shows are not yet included, the following are now available for download:

1. The Sopranos
2. Sex and the City
3. Deadwood
4. Rome
5. Flight of the Conchords
6. The Wire

The most interesting piece of news to come out of the deal is that Apple has agreed to sell their shows for more than just $1.99. Many of the shows listed above will sell for $2.99 an episode.

Does this mean that Apple and NBC will make up?

The folks over at The Apple blog posted a few articles today about status on the iPhone. We’ve mentioned previously that AT&T has recommended use of the 3G network with the iPhone but now some details about the new phone coming soon come straight from Apple themselves.

First, the 3G iPhone preference is included in the Beta 5 Firmware for the iPhone. This is a feature that you can turn on or off and instructions list that using 3G will decrease battery life.

Second, the online Apple Store is currently listing that they are out of 8gb and 16gb iPhones. This usually means that Apple has stopped selling the current model as the new model is just around the corner.

With the developers conference still being a few weeks away, I find it hard to believe that Apple will just stop selling iPhones for most the month of May. Of course… they may just be waiting on the next shipment from their manufacturers.

Either way, I hope to see new 3G iPhones sooner rather than later.

The Automator tip of the week walks you through one way to extract the contact information from Address book and put it into a format that you can upload to Gmail.

Gmail accepts csv files for importing contacts. Unfortunately Address Book does not export directly to csv. Why it doesn’t is a puzzle in it self, but thankfully we can get the same results through Automator with the use of some Microsoft Office actions.

To create a csv file Automator of your contacts in Address Book add the following actions to a workflow:

1. Find People in Address Book, Set Whose to Name, is not equal to, and then use * in the input field - This tells automator to look through all the names in your address book and return everyone that doesn’t have a * in their name.
2. Get Contact Information, Export Format: Spreadsheet (tabs) - This gathers all the information about each contact and puts it into a standard format we can work with.
3. New Text File - I named it contacts.txt and saved it to my desktop - This will write the information from address book to a text file
4. Import Text Files to Excel Workbook - Select New Workbook and mark the delimiters as Tab
5. Save Excel Workbooks - Save Workbooks as contacts, on the desktop and select CSV(Comma Delimited) as the format

Import Address Book CSV File to Gmail

If everything was constructed correctly you should be able to run the workflow and 2 files will be written to your desktop. From here we can import our contacts.csv file into Gmail.

To import your contacts.csv to gmail:

1. Login to Gmail
2. Click Contacts
3. Click Import
4. Choose your contacts.csv file and click Import
5. Follow the final instructions from Gmail and verify your contacts imported correctly

Now that we’ve showed how to complete this process with Automator, there is also an application - A to G that was built do extract Address Book Contacts and place them in a CSV file.

Importing Contacts from Gmail into Address Book is a bit easier.