Now that Adobe Air is starting to get itself established, there are some really exciting applications based on it coming out and one of them is mooFlair. As more and more applications become desktop based, mooFlair applies this principle to video downloading and viewing by helping you manage and watch both online and offline FLVs videos. But don’t mistake it for just another FLV player because its much more than that.
mooFlair allows you to build your own FLV library of FLV videos both on and offline and save your compilations in playlists. This includes FLV files such as h.264 encoded videos, those on RSS Feeds or those from content providers such as YouTube. If you don’t have time to watch them online, mooFlair can select several videos at once and download them for later viewing while you get on with more important things. Two things were rather annoying in the original release though – it used to hog your memory and you couldn’t watch videos in fullscreen mode but all that has been ironed out in the latest release. The design and feel of mooFlair is excellent too – this doesn’t feel like yet another YouTube downloader – it’s a solid looking application with lots of gloss and touches of class. Searching videos is still a little bit awkward though because the search option has been hidden away in the file menu and you still can’t search several video sites at once. Of course, one other big disadvantage is that you can’t view any of the comments attached to the videos you are watching which for me, is half the fun anyway.
However, as a one stop solution for viewing, storing and downloading FLV videos from a variety of sources, mooFlair is one of the best solutions yet and if this is an indication of what is to come from Adobe Air, the future looks very bright indeed for desktop apps. Note that mooFlair currently runs on Windows and Mac but a beta version for Linux is under development.
