RefreshingApps.com

Daniel Dura has released an AIR application called Moderator. It allows you to moderate your Wordpress blog comments direct from your desktop using Adobe AIR.

This is a very early release but the feature list already looks impressive. Dock and system tray icons show the number of unmoderated comments. You can accept, delete or mark as spam the comments directly in the app. If the user has a Gravatar then this get’s shown next to the awaiting comment.

Via the setting button, you get to control the polling interval between 1 and 60 minutes. There is also update functionality built into the AIR app for future updates.

To get this working you will need to be running a Wordpress install of version 2.6+ and have AIR version 1.1. The download is supplied in a ZIP file that contains the required Wordpress plugin and associated AIR badge installers.

So simply install the Wordpress plugin in the usual way, head on over to your settings tab and then go to the Moderator tab to install the AIR app from the installer badge. I did have a problem with the SWFObject JavaScript code used to place Flash content on the Wordpress admin panel page and this is related to the Flash player 10 release and should be solved soon. It’s worth saying that this is unrelated to Daniel’s work with Moderator. If you too have problems you can get the direct URL to the AIR install out of the page code.

Design eye

Nice looking app and an inspired logo that looks great sat at home in my dock. Looks to have the same base skin as Tweetdeck and there is nothing wrong with that.

I liked the inclusion of the Gravatar’s and the number of comments in the dock or systray is a nice concept so that you can still keep an eye it in the background.

Technical eye

This is obviously a little different to the normal AIR apps we see on RefreshingApps.com. You must have the pre-requisite of a 2.6+ version of Wordpress and the plugin code. But this is built using Adobe Flex 3 and some nice PHP to power the comment data from the AIR app.