Kristof Neirynck » AIR

on Air Brussels

Kristof Neirynck — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:52:39 +0000

A long overdue overview of the on Air event in Brussels.

Keynote (Serge Jespers)

AIR 1.1 expected middle of 2008 and it will have multi language support (Dutch not confirmed, but French will be in there)
Impressive demo of os integration: drag and drop image from air app on ubuntu in virtual machine to mac desktop
MAX 2008 will be in Milan
I asked Serge behind the scenes about shu and he said adobe isn’t sure weather they’ll allow it.

Building your first Adobe AIR application with Adobe Flex (Mike Chambers)

Two links:

Building your first AIR application with HTML and JavaScript (Kevin Hoyt)

Air introspector is like a firebug for Air.
Aptana Studio is the best javascript editor ever. Great code completion.
The eval() function doesn’t work in html component after onload. This is also a problem for setTimeout. Most javascript frameworks have already been adapted.
flexigrid converts html table into interactive flex tables

Leveraging HTML and JavaScript within Adobe AIR (Ryan Stewart)

Reading a zip file with air is accessible from javascript. This gives me perspectives for quite a few apps.

Deploying and Updating AIR Applications (Serge Jespers)

Signing your Air apps is not only recommended, it changes the warning in the installer into something less scary. Thawte is selling certificates (299 $ / year = 190 € / year)
New Air install badge in beta.

Introduction to SQLite in Adobe AIR (Peter Elst)

You can watch it yourself and the slides and apps are online too. This was my favorite session of the day. There is something about storing flvs from youtube in a local database that is so cool …

Developing Secure AIR Applications (Oliver Goldman)

Among many other things Oliver recommended to check the version number yourself when upgrading to prevent downgrade attacks. You can’t rely on the user to look at it himself.

Using JavaScript Frameworks in AIR Applications (Andre Charland)

Andre put his slides and apps online
Xtnd code completion for jquery in Dreamweaver
Scrutinizer is a browser with blurriness built-in like my own Silver Explorer. Behind the scenes Andre told me he’s thinking about integrating it with RobotReplay so he can replay user interactions and show the part around the mouse cursor in clear sight but blur everything around it. Looks promising.

AIR Conditioning (Lee Brimelow)

Lee showed us a lot of really fun apps, you can find his slides here.

Silver Explorer

Kristof Neirynck — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:08:20 +0000

As most of my friends know, I’m partially colorblind. Most webdevelopers have no idea what their site looks like for someone like me. Thanks to the power of Adobe Air I’m now capable of letting you experience it firsthand.

Silver Explorer is a browser that lets you surf the net in grayscale.

silverexplorer.air Flash version 9.0.115 required

AIR afterhours

Kristof Neirynck — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:55:00 +0000

I’ve been to a great afterhours session about AIR with Peter Elst. He’s writing a book on the subject so obviously there was lots he had to teach. He covered the windowing, file, dragdrop, sqlite and upgrade apis. This was a bring-your-own-laptop session so all the people present were experimenting with the code. We found a few oddities that you usually learn the hard way.

FileFilter behaves differently on mac and windows. On windows the extension parameter must start with an asterisk "*.html", on mac both "*.html" and ".html" seem to work.

Creating and manipulating NativeWindows works great, but adding flex components to the stage of a new NativeWindow doesn’t seem to work. Daniel Dura had a workaround for this, but that doesn’t seem to work anymore.

He gifted a few books at the end. ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns is now mine. Thanks Peter!

Update: Peter has remembered how to use mx.core.Window as a a native window.