With the Olympics in full swing, many of us have been inspired to dust off our bicycles, running shoes, or leotards (!) but for the designers/developers among us it also inspires something else… The need to create cool and/or useful things around it based, of course, on the latest technology - in this case AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) applications.

AIR allows you to build desktop-based applications from web-based technologies like Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript. There are a few AIR apps that have been around for some time now and are becoming increasingly well known - such as eBay Desktop and the Google Analytics reporting tool (by Nicholas Lierman).

BBC Olympics AIR app

Never one to be behind-the-times, the BBC have released a new AIR app (built on the foundation of their existing BBC News widget) which allows you to customise the feeds from their website around your favourite Olympic sports, as well as giving reminders for when events are about to start.

In the spirit of the BBC website, the app has a very user-friendly, easy to use interface whilst still remaining visually appealing and incorporating your choice of Monkey Magic! character that the BBC resurrected for this year’s Olympics. Unfortunately there are a few bits that let it down, such as the poorly customised scroll bar and it’s apparent need to randomly switch feeds every now and then. A nice addition might have been to be able to see all of your favourite feeds on one screen, rather than having to switch between them. But all-in-all it is a useful, well made application that will allow you to keep up-to-date with all of the medals that the GB team will no doubt be winning!

Team USA Olympics AIR app from filtrbox

For our American friends, there is an alternative AIR app - the Team USA Olympic News widget, produced by filtrbox. I have to say this is vastly inferior to the BBC one. It cannot display images in the feed, and seems to add several of its own [Filtr] tags to the end, which looks messy. You also can’t preview the article in the application like you can do in the BBC one, and it is visually less appealing.

That said, it does allow further customisation to the BBC one, allowing you to focus on several specific events or athletes, and presenting it all in a single screen. So if you are only interested in how many Gold medals Phelps has now won, it is a good alternative to the BBC version.