Adobe AIR + WordPress = AirPress

2 Comments October 11, 2007 1567 Views

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AirPress is a desktop blogging client created by Romain Referrer and Jean-Francois Comeau and is based on Adobe AIR or Adobe Integrated Runtime. It’s kinda like Windows Live Writer but with lesser features.

With AirPress, you don’t need a FTP client to upload photos, audio or video files and you can do video blogging straight up without a webcam capture software and best of all, you can do all of it offline in your computer. Just save the post and publish it later when you’re connected to the Internet.

Aside from its basic features of posting text, photos, audio (mp3), video (flv), webcam streaming (direct from AirPress) and webcam snapshot, it also has several features that it gets from Adobe AIR.

Adobe AIR features used:

• Custom/animated windows
• Embedded database for offline read/creation of posts
• Detection offline/online
• File I/O API for saving FLV webcam videos record
• ActionScript/JavaScript Script bridging to interact with the text editor made in HTML/javascript.
• Drag and Drop Support for the media (pictures, sounds, videos, flash animations) you want to insert in your post.
• Network communication with the blogs via XML-RPC

Screenshots:

Main menu

Import blog

View/Edit posts

Add post

Text editor

Insert audio

Record video

My Take:
AirPress has a beautiful user interface, its easy to install and user-friendly. It’s still in beta and is a bit buggy but it looks very promising. One of the things I like about it is being able to add and edit posts offline which is useful especially if you have a poor or limited Internet connection.

However, AirPress doesn’t work for me. I’m sticking to the regular way of blogging via the WordPress dashboard. I’m not into WYSIWYG editors and AirPress still lacks some essential options for inserting tags or optional excerpts. If you’re into video blogging or your blog posts are simple and doesn’t require much tags and other stuff, then you should definitely try out AirPress. One feature or option that I’d like to see added to AirPress is the option to choose between a Visual and Code editor like in WordPress.

Aside from WordPress the only blog platform that AirPress supports right now is DotClear. If they can add more platforms like Blogger or TypePad, I’m sure more people would use it.

NOTE: AirPress requires Adobe Adobe Integrated Runtime Beta 1 version to be installed before you can use AirPress. You can download Adobe AIR Beta 1 here.

Have you tried AirPress? What are the things you like and/or dislike about it? If you could add more features what would it be? Share your thoughts.