Google Reader on your desktop in Adobe Air

Google Reader has to be the best RSS feed manager I’ve ever used, so I was looking forward to seeing how good it might look based on Adobe Air’s platform.

In the end, maybe I expected too much because it didn’t impress me as much as I’d hoped. After recently trying the excellent Times Reader based on Adobe Air, I thought Google Reader would look just as elegant but the reality is it ends up looking rather stripped-down and basic compared to the real thing. The interface is similar to Google Reader, allowing you to add stars to items, share items and mark items as read. Each feed also displays a count of all your unread items.

In addition, you can subscribe and unsubscribe to and from your feeds, and ReadAir syncs automatically with your Google Reader account. However, the configuration options available in Google Reader are not accessible in ReadAir. You also can’t use Google Gears with ReadAir for reading posts offline. The overall presentation of ReadAir could have made better use of the elegance offered by Air and OS X, but it could serve as a useful backup if you can’t use Google Reader in your browser for any reason.

I expected more from ReadAir than it delivered but for those fans of the rapidly growing Adobe Air platform, it’s worth adding to your collection.