BeauScott.com

I’ve been working a lot in Flex 2/3 and Adobe Integrated Runtime over the past year (which is why my blog has been so neglected), and finally got around to making an example application that shows off some of the capabilities of Adobe AIR. I’d like to introduce Cheapo!, an AIR-based deal-site monitoring application. It runs in your system tray (yeah… windows systems are currently the only supported. It does run on a mac, but there are some glitches with menus — I’m fixing these shortly) and alerts you once an update has been posted to one of several deal sites. In reality, it’s nothing more than a glorified RSS reader with some customized styling. In it’s current release, it’s a closed source application because it’s a customized list of deal sites and I’m offering it as a companion application on a few other sites. However, I will be releasing the RSS reader/alerter part of it as open source shortly which will allow you to build your own RSS feed alerting application.

Currently, the featured deal-sites are Woot (with support for Woot-offs), Gottadeal, Passwird, Slick Deals, Buy.com and Amazon’s Gold Box. If you have any other deal-site suggestions, please let me know.

To run this application, you’ll need the latest Adobe Integrated Runtime (currently Beta 3).

Once you have installed the runtime, click this link and select “Run from current location” (or whatever the equivelant is in your browser)

As always, please send me feedback and bug issues and I’ll do by best to release a fix for whatever issue you might be having as soon as possible.