Cricket on your desktop

I’m not a cricket buff but the IPL had got even me hooked. Well, at
least during dinner. But for people who are crazy about cricket and
want to follow ball-by-ball updates and certainly don’t like
refreshing horrible-looking websites, then you might find Cricket
Nirvana’s
CricketCentre
interesting:

The best part is that it runs on your desktop.

The good part is the range of functionality – real time ball-by-ball
score updates, full scorecards, wagon-wheel and what not statistics,
you can throw flowers or tomatoes at the cricketer of your choice and
most of all, it pops up a GTalk-style notification for important
events like a sixer, four or a batsman gets out!

The bad part is that the look and feel is too kiddish for my taste and
the UI needs to be more simplified.

Back to the plus points, my favorite part is the mini-score card mode
which will show up on the bottom-right corner of your desktop:

This idea was conceived and (as far as I know) executed entirely by
Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Srinivas
Annam,
Arun Madas and many others in the Adobe Flex team in Bangalore. If
this isn’t cool stuff happening in India dev centres, I don’t know
what
is.
And what better way to show off AIR’s capabilities :-)

I know they have had some tough times in convincing cricket
websites
about this idea, but it’s good to see it finally out.