Theoretically someone could make a packaged browser + greasemonkey + stylish AIR app for particular web sites that growl notifies and lives in the dock and be more in your face; but this scaffold right now is pretty basic.

I should also mention there is a website called airifier which does this as well, except I think they give you a packaged app only, without the source.

I also got a bunch of fixes into this version of airake; packaging is fixed, and there is a task for creating certificates, among other things. I just deployed version 0.2.4 to rubyforge so it should be up by the time you read this.

The usage:

browsair GReader http://reader.google.com path/to/rss_icon_128x128.png

Creates an AIR project for a google reader AIR app. In the GReader project, run:

rake air:package CERTIFICATE=path/to/cert.pfx

If you need to generate a certificate:

rake air:certificate CERTIFICATE=../ducktyper.pfx

I built a couple already if you want to bypass all that compiling:

• Google Reader – GReader.air
• Facebook – Facebook.air

(If you don’t have the AIR runtime installed, get it here)

I GPL licensed all the source to Slickr (that I wrote), and released it into the wild. You can view the trac page, or go straight to the source. Its all C# and OpenGL goodness with some gnarly calls to some windows api’s (for extra’s nothing critical). There are a couple NAnt build scripts for when I was trying to get it working under linux, but you’ll want Visual Studio (2003) to get started quick (and look at the README).
Who knew it would be such a pain to draw text and did I really need to query the monitor power state?

I’ll try to write an overall design doc soon, but until then start at any of the Entrypoint‘s. And in the end all that is really going on is this:

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private void DrawGLTexture(SlickrImage image)
{
  PointFloat p = image.GetMovement(window.Width, window.Height, true);
  float scale = image.GetScale(window.Width, window.Height);
  float fade = image.GetPercentageFade();
  int texWidth = image.TextureWidth;
  int texHeight = image.TextureHeight;

  Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_PROJECTION);                                  // Select The Projection Matrix
  Gl.glLoadIdentity();                                                // Reset The Projection Matrix
  float r = (window.Width/scale);
  float b = (window.Height/scale);

  Gl.glOrtho(0, r, b, 0, -1.0f, 1.0f);
  Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_MODELVIEW);                                   // Select The Modelview Matrix
  Gl.glLoadIdentity();

  Gl.glEnable (Gl.GL_BLEND); // for text fading
  Gl.glBlendFunc (Gl.GL_ONE, Gl.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
  Gl.glColor4f (fade, fade, fade, fade);

  float posX = p.x; //stepX +
  float posY = p.y; //stepY +

  image.DrawAtPoint(posX, posY);

  Gl.glDisable(Gl.GL_BLEND);
}

If you are interesting in working on bug fixes, enhacements, or whatever give me a shout.