A new beta of the Adobe AIR runtime has been released recently, and there are a heap of new features that complement the concurrent release of Flex 3 with extra publishing options for AIR. Mike opened with a fairly decent example of an AIR application that can be downloaded from the site http://www.finetune.com/ which is available as a desktop player download for their music library. We need more examples like these!
A few included features for the new release are:
- Native menu support (for mac)
- Windows toolbar support
- Support for “View Source” option in the right-click menu.
- XML descriptor file used to set up variables that are used by the runtime and installer (things such as name, description, systemchrome etc.)
A walkthrough was shown of a demo AIR application that, once compiled, could create and save a simple text file. This was achieved using the File system class extensions for AS3 designed specifically for use with AIR, which are capable of saving any type of data as a file including text, binary and even flash object files (something that might be useful for caching application settings etc.)
Available installation options were also a topic of discussion, as AIR is still a relatively new runtime. The application you create requires a core set of files to run, and these need only be downloaded once. Your installer therefore checks the desktop machine to see whether the AIR runtime is already present, and downloads a copy automatically from Adobe if it is required. A new template available from the link below allows for a one click “badge” installer (seem to remember that from Central days…) that can be inserted in a webpage and does most of the detection work for you.
Another security feature that Adobe have introduced is the technique of signing an AIR application. You can send a webform to Adobe to get an official app-specific signing code, or autogenerate an unofficial code. I assume you’ll get some disclaimer written into the installer file that tells the user whether the code used for creation was a trusted code from Adobe, and people can choose whether they want to trust the author based on that information.
I’m not sure whether the presentation will be put online, but you can always find out by visiting Mike’s blog:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/.
For more details on the latest AIR development tools, check out the links below
http://www.awadobe.com/go/air/
Rob