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

Recent years have sign a continual growth in new and amazing web technologies.

Applications have been developed to make communication easier, to share media, and to provide endless amounts of information to people looking for it.

Adobe has been so impressed with the web technologies that have been developed that they developed a way to bring all these web technologies to the desktop. Adobe Air does just that.

One of Adobe Air’s strengths is that it allows developers to write code that works on all operating systems… Windows, OS X, and more.

If you’d like to check out Adobe Air, head over to the Adobe product website to download the technology that will allow multiple applications built on web technologies to run on OS X desktop.

After you’ve installed Adobe Air. I suggest trying out Twhirl, an Adobe Air application that brings your twitter experience to your desktop.

Additionally, Twhirl adds some basic functionality to make sending Twits to your friends and followers as well as make some as favorites. Send links, pictures, and your basic twits without having to launch Safari.