Have you built an amazing AIR application? Are you looking for ways to get it into the marketplace? Or perhaps you're shopping for a free application to help you be more productive? Or maybe you're a gamer and just looking for some fun for the desktop?

Whatever your objective, I invite you to visit the Adobe AIR Marketplace, where you can publish your AIR application and discover new applications that bring the web to your desktop through Adobe AIR. In the Marketplace, you will find hundreds of applications categorized by, for example, Music, Communications, Business, Games, Tools, Travel, Science, and Shopping. You can also sort offerings by highest rated or most popular applications. Best of all, most of the applications are free.

As product manager for the AIR Marketplace, I want to inform you about some significant improvements to the Marketplace and highlight some of my favorite applications.

Fresh from the Marketplace

Since we first launched in October 2007, our goal with the Marketplace has been twofold: To help developers showcase their applications and to provide a marketplace for consumers to easily find and download useful applications.

Over the past year, we've received a steady stream of feedback and in response we recently made several major improvements to address our community's needs. Overall, the Marketplace now offers a better experience for users and more services for our developer community.

For example, among the most popular requests we received from developers was the ability to better promote their applications on the Marketplace through the use of RSS feeds and an "email a friend" feature. Developers also wanted the ability to create a profile on the Marketplace for self-promotion. Request granted! Additionally, developers wanted to view performance analytics such as statistics for downloads, ratings, and reviews through an application dashboard. Makes sense, so we also added a dashboard.

In addition to rating and reviewing applications, visitors can now also comment and flag an application. This is not only great for users, but also for developers, who can use this feedback to improve their applications and to receive community validation.

And we've only just begun, as we continue to plan new features for our users, and find new ways to get more applications onto the Marketplace. We receive the best ideas from our community of users, so please continue to send your suggestions.

Finally, a few of my favorite apps

I am not only the product manager for the AIR Marketplace, I am also a user. I've downloaded many apps for work reasons, but have kept quite a few for personal productivity and entertainment. I'd like to leave you with a list of my favorite apps in hopes that you may find one or two useful and interesting.

• Sam's Interactive Reader: I have kids and am always looking for cool kid-oriented applications. Sam's Interactive Reader allows your children to discover the fun of reading and learning through interactive media. Kids can read books and do various activities within the application. My kids love it and stay engaged for hours (and I definitely appreciate the quiet time).
• TweetDeck: This helps split the tweets from Twitter in specific columns based on your preferences, thus allowing quicker access to topics of interest. It also lets you search tweets and respond, all from within the application. I love its usability.
• Finetune: This is a desktop music player for the Finetune music service. I have a Finetune profile with an associated playlist. With this application running on my desktop I can quickly access my customized Finetune playlists and playlists associated with artists, and listen to any soundtrack uninterrupted.
• EarthBrowser: This desktop application lets me view a dynamic globe with live weather, satellite overlays, clouds, earthquakes and more. You can zoom into the 3-D globe and moved around. It's visually impressive, almost what an astronaut would see, and is also great for educational purposes.
• Parleys.com: This is a great RIA e-learning application that delivers video talks, podcasts, and slides. The presentation time line allows me to add comments and tags. I can even download presentations and view them offline whenever I want!
• Mockups For Desktop: You create software mockups in minutes, iterate them with the team and then embed them in the specs. I like to use it as a whiteboard when brainstorming with my co-workers.
• Desktube: This app lets me control YouTube from my desktop and allows me to search, watch, upload, download, comment, and get embed codes from YouTube.com. It's also integrated with Ribbit and Twitter.

Don't forget, publish to the AIR Marketplace

We are always looking for interesting AIR application. So, if you're at home working on an AIR app and want to share it with the community, then please visit the Adobe AIR Marketplace. Look around, check out what your peers have done, and try to identify useful, innovative apps that may fill the needs of users (or show off your originality, imagination, and creativity). I would really like to see some rich applications that let me track flights, play games like Second Life on my computer, or help me shop on the Internet by informing me of great deals I might be interested in... and I'd love to see a great social networking app.

Note: When you name your app, please avoid using or combining terms that are already copyrighted by Adobe or other companies. We accept most AIR applications, but we cannot accept apps that violate any copyright trademarks.

One (1) complimentary Adobe AIR T-shirt will be sent to the first ten (10) individuals who upload a new, original Adobe AIR application to the Adobe AIR Marketplace Beta website. This offer is valid beginning 12:00 AM PDT, February 10, 2009 and will end at 11:59 PM PDT on February 17, 2009. This offer is available to developers worldwide. This offer is void where prohibited by law.

For more information, go to the Adobe AIR Marketplace. Still have questions about the Marketplace? Check out the Adobe AIR Marketplace FAQ.

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