What are the Adobe AIR apps that you couldn’t live without?  Tell us in the comments!

DeskTube - DeskTube lets you get complete control over YouTube on your desktop. Search, watch, comment, get embed codes, upload your own videos and even download the videos you are currently watching as MOV files.

Dorame - Dorame doesn’t add much to the Pandora listening experience, but it does give you the freedom of being outside of your browser and changing up the appearance of the service.

EarthBrowser - EarthBrowser gives you live updates of clouds, earthquakes, the weather, satellite overlays, volcanoes, fires and a whole lot more.

Feedalizr - Many people have downloaded service specific apps like TweetDeck, Twhirl and so on, but Feedalizr rolls several social tools into one app.  You can work with Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Twitter and VideoVideo all from this one handy interface.

Google Analytics - While most people love looking at statistics about their websites, Google Analytics can be a bit slow at times for those webmasters that use their tools.  This Adobe AIR app gives you the ability to open reports in multiple tabs for easier switching and allows you to change date ranges faster.

MiniTask - A desktop tool for creating detailed to-do lists that you can separate out by categories, copy the items out to other programs, set reminders, print out task sheets and more.

Posty - Get all of your FriendFeed. Identi.ca, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter updates in one handy application with built-in URL shortening, spell checking, message search and more.

TweetDeck - While it seems that apps only work with one social site are becoming passe, TweetDeck gives you so much control over how you see your Tweets, it is well worth it.  Your incoming messages are already split into columns for timeline, replies and direct messages, and then you can build custom columns for things such as work, friends and more.

Twhirl - The odds are fairly high that this is the application you installed Adobe Air for in the first place, but that doesn’t exclude it from the list in case it wasn’t.  Probably the most popular of the Twitter clients, Twhirl also supports interactions with multiple accounts for FriendFeed, laconi.ca, seesmic and Twitter.

Yammer - Yammer, the private corporate microblogging service, gets a desktop client that runs on the Adobe AIR platform, allowing you to use all the features of the service freed from your browser.

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Presently is a hosted micro-update platform that allows members of a team to update others about their work and activities. Users can add text attachments, broadcast message to a group or account, share photos and other attachments. The homepage contains a textbox at the right side and below that you can see your following, your followers and the groups you have joined. On the left side you will be able to see the latest updates. You can also check out the questions asked by other in the Question section. Other than this you can create tags on update in order to categorize information, customize the color of application and receive updates through text and instant message.

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

Ding It’s Up is a unique service that provides you website downtime alerts via Twitter. You can get updates in your email, mobile or Twitter about when a site goes back up. The service sends you a message about the concerned website (that you entered), and you don’t even need to register for this service.

Ding It’s Up and more services like these are used by webmasters who have to monitor their own sites, though it’s also useful for people who are frequent users of Twitter, YouTube and other social tools/networks.

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Company Name

Dailymile

20-Word Description

Dailymile is a social training site for runners, triathletes, and cyclists.

CEO’s Pitch

That race was great, but how do I stay in-touch with the people I just met? And how can I find people to train with in a new city? Providing an answer for these questions drove us to begin dailymile. We wanted to find a better way for athletes to sign-up for races, share workouts, and meet participants. Participating in a race doesn’t end after you submit payment. It’s the daily journey of training, learning, and sharing. As athletes, each day for us is an adventure filled with lessons learned and friends made. We share these experiences with one another through dailymile.

Mashable’s Take

Currently in private beta, Dailymile is a site for keeping track of your workouts, finding athletic events you can participate in, and sending motivation to others. The design is very slick and the features are well-organized, and while the event section dedicated to 10Ks and triathlons can be intimidating, there are tools that can be useful to just about any level of athlete – even if you’re just the type trying to stay in shape by going to the gym.

Once logged in, the homepage of Dailymile is very Twitter-esque, allowing you post a short update about your most recent workout (which can range from running, to swimming, to weightlifting, etc.), as well as multimedia content like photos and videos. There is also a “You and Your Friends” timeline, an “Everyone” timeline, and a “My Training” log – essentially the same views offered on Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, your updates can be auto-posted to the service if you sync your accounts.

Dailymile takes it a step further than other would-be Twitter clones though with some features very specific to the fitness niche. For one, there is the “Motivation” feature, which allows you to message other people on the site with a pre-set message like “Great Performance” or “You’re an Inspiration.”

There are also discussion groups you can join like “40+ and proud of it” and “My first marathon,” so you can find people pursuing a similar fitness goal as yourself. The aforementioned event section is already seeded with lots of running, trialthon, and cycling events you can participate in, though most seem to be on the West coast (not surprising given the time of year).

Ultimately, Dailymile has adopted a lot of popular features of other sites for the fitness niche and done a nice job with them. I think it’s more likely to be successful with serious workout nuts than weekend warriors, but there is certainly something for anyone that wants to put the time in - both in the gym and on the site. As mentioned, Dailymile is currently in private beta, but you can try it out using the invite code ‘mashable’.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

If you’re like me, sending holiday cards is one of those “necessary evils” of the holidays. A new service, Ecardlets.com, hopes to make the process a little easier — at least for your friends with iPhones.

Ecardlets.com is a San Francisco, CA startup founded by ex-Microsoft and ex-Googlers, and has just launched its initial public beta of the first-ever ecard platform designed specifically for the iPhone. The unique three-dimensional greeting cards take advantage of the iPhone touch screen by allowing recipients to open and flip the cards with just a flick of the finger.

I tried out the service today by sending myself a few cards. The service couldn’t be any easier to use. Simply design your card and hit “send.” The service sends a text message to your AT&T iPhone recipient which includes a link to your card. Then simply swipe your finger to open the card and read the enclosed message.

There are plenty of stock cards ready to send (there’s even a “Congratulations on your new iPhone” card), but the service will become a lot more interesting as more people begin uploading their own card designs. The site offers a Photoshop (PSD) template that you can download to make your own ecardlet that others can then send. Right now you have to email your designs to ecardlets.com but the site is working on a system to enable user-generated ecardlets.

So spice up your greeting cards this holiday season and send your iPhone-toting friends something different.

Ecardlets.com is, at least for now, completely free to use…so send to your hearts content.

What are some of your favorite Windows Mobile applications? Let us know in the comments!

Games

Death Drive - Who doesn’t love a little vehicular combat?  Death Drive brings Carmageddon like combat to your Windows Mobile powered device.

Kevtris - What is mobile gaming without at least one version of Tetris?

Pocket Heroes - Pocket Heroes is a Heroes of Might and Magic game clone for Pocket PC.  It may be a bit simple for some, but still a lot of fun.

Realms - A space based shooting game that might remind you a bit of the old Asteroids arcade game, but only in concept.  Multiple ships to choose from and numerous levels to explore.

Internet Tools

Fring - Fring brings their instant messaging services to more than just the iPhone and iPod Touch with a Windows Mobile version.  Allows you to instant message with AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, SIP, Skype, Twitter and Yahoo.

Opera Mobile - The popular Opera browser comes to the mobile format with a full set of features.

Slick - Allows you to instant message with AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo. Also has text messaging, emoticons, message history and more.

TwitToday - A plugin for your Today screen that allows you to post to your Twitter account.

Web Viewer - Web Viewer is an expansion to the web browsing ability with a tabbed browser that allows you to save open tabs and more.

Media Players

MPlayer for Windows Mobile - Part of the MPlayer suite for Linux, MPlayer for Windows Mobile will let you play Flash videos as well as videos in the RV40, RV30, R20, sipro, cook and atrac codecs.

RealPlayer - An official mobile release for the famous Real One Player.

The Core Pocket Media Player - TCPMP, as it is known, supports a dizzying array of video and audio formats from DivX to Ogg Vorbis.

YouTubePlayer - Just as the name implies, YouTubePlayer lets you to search YouTube for videos and then plays them in their native FLV format.

Phone Applications

Call Firewall - Call Firewall does exactly what you would think it might in that it helps you create blacklists and whitelists for your Windows Mobile powered cell phone.  One of the coolest features is that it will send an SMS to a blocked call telling them why they were blocked.

iDialer - iDialer, pictured above, gives you a new dialing interface that feels similar to another popular phone’s dialing system.  It does offer compatibility with popular Internet phone services such as Grand Central and JaJah.

Skype - The well known Skype service is available for Windows Mobile, enabling you to make Skype calls from your mobile, saving you a lot of money on calls.

Utilities

CapSure - You can capture your screen in BMP, GIF, JPG or PNG and then add captions, obscure sensitive information and more.

Dashwire - Allows you to sync your phone at all times including pictures, files, contacts, messages and more.  Cool feature that lets you see texts on your computer as they arrive at your phone.

GSync - As you can probably guess by the name, GSync allows you to synchronize your Google Calendar with your Windows Mobile powered phone.  The app is available in Dutch, English and Italian.

iContact - iContact changes your contact interface to more of an iPhone style system that allows you to browse through your contacts with just a flick of your finger.

Pocket RAR - An official version of the RAR archive manager that you can use on your mobile device.

SoftKey Manager - This app allows you to edit the soft keys on your Today screen.

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"In its profound wisdom, the FTC is allowing cell phone numbers to be released to telemarketers today. Now you can have the pleasure of being annoyed by a pesky telemarketing when you are just sitting down to dinner and have the pleasure of paying for it as well. Whatever possessed a government agency that is supposed to safeguard citizens’ rights to release private information to these vultures? In my opinion, telemarketers are the lowest life forms in the food chain and should be hunted down and exterminated. There should be a bounty on them."

I rarely receive telemarking calls on my mobile phone but I also have a habit of not answering the phone when someone who is not in my address book calls me. I figure if it is important they will leave me a voicemail and if they know me they will know to shoot me an email or SMS message instead of calling in the first place. However this decision still annoys me. It was one thing when telemarkers called you on your landline and you didn't have to pay for the call, but now that any of these answered calls are going come out of your minute package I feel this is highly inappropriate. I mean really, who still uses telemarketing nowadays? We live in the future. You would think these people never heard of SPAM before. Come on people, get on the ball!

The good news is you can add your mobile number to the national Do Not Call list. To do so please point your browser to http://www.ftc.gov/donotcall.

EDIT: Story turned out to be false, but its still a good idea to add your number to the list or even to make sure your landline is added to the list as well.

Downloading the latest versions of your favorite programs is a tiring task, especially on a fresh installation of Windows. Navigating through the mess of websites and download links is frustrating, waiting for the installers to download is boring, and running each one separately is annoying. A very popular unattended software installation program called MultiSet is able to do this too but has evolved into a more powerful unattended installation software that includes installing Windows. MultiSet is also a shareware that normally cost a whopping $99.95 per license. Here is an alternative for MultiSet called InstallPad which is FREE and can automatically download and install your favorite latest software so you can go and take care of your other more important things in life.

InstallPad takes a list of your favorite programs and will download and install the ones you pick. It doesn’t need to ask any questions, so you can go do more important things. InstallPad can resume downloads you’ve canceled, and can even try and find the latest version of your program online.

If you administrate or develop for Windows, InstallPad can help you get a machine set up with service packs, applications or development tools without the need for CDs or running lots of scripts. With it you can quickly install a host of programs silently, pass arguments to the installers, and run post-installation scripts.

InstallPad supports silent install which installs the program bypassing all those confirmation message boxes. By default, InstallPad uses the arguments “/S -s”, which work for the majority of installers (InstallShield and the Nullsoft Installer System). Some applications are special cased, like Firefox, which requires -ms for a silent install. If your application requires different arguments to install silently, the built-in Silent Install will not work out of the box. Instead, you should find out what arguments are required to make the install run silent, and provide them via Installer Arguments. Lucky you, I’ve already done the homework months ago on how to find hidden command line silent switches for setup files.

Other than that, InstallPad also supports automatically downloading the latest version of the program that you specified. InstallPad parses the download URL, tries to infer what the program’s version is from the url, and then increments the version (both major and minor numbers), until the server returns file not found. This can only work with URLs that have some version information in them. InstallPad does not maintain a central online database, nor is it omniscient, and cannot therefore find the latest version of a program any other way. This method is not really perfect because there are some software developers may at times jump from version 5.0 to 5.5 to indicate that significant features have been added.

If you’ve already downloaded all the setup files and don’t want InstallPad to redownload again, you can use the file:// command. InstallPad supports HTTP, FTP, and file:// URLs. Here are some examples:

To download from HTTP: http://winscp.net/download/winscp381setup.exe

To download from FTP: ftp://ftp.icq.com/pub/ICQ_5/icq5_1_setup.exe

To install from local setup file: file:///c:/myFolder/myFile.exe

To install from network setup file: file://///networkMachine/sharedFolder/file.exe

InstallPad requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to run. It didn’t make a lot of sense for InstallPad to run with .NET Framework 2.0 installed because a fresh Windows XP SP2 doesn’t have .NET Framework 2.0 installed by default. So you’ll still need to manually install the .NET Framework 2.0 first before running InstallPad to run an unattended software installation. As for Vista, you don’t have to worry too much because it comes with .NET Framework 3.0. Let’s hope the developer of AkelPad will make it run without any dependencies.

[ Download InstallPad 0.3 ]

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