Archive | December, 2008

ADM – Application Descriptor Manager

by on 2nd December, 2008 in Air

Application Descriptior Manager is another application like the AIR Badger and Icon Generator – a development tool, built in AIR, for developing AIR applications.  It’s useful, functional and has reassuring touches like auto-backup, or version upgrade buttons.

Once installed, you point it at an AIR application descriptor file, which it reads in, and displays the contents in a few simple flex forms.  Of course, editing the XML yourself isn’t something that’s out of the question normally, but the ADM application makes it all easier to manage – just like the AIR Badger does for the application install badges.

Download the ADM application from Flex My Day.

Getting your source code hosted on Google Code…

by on 1st December, 2008 in ActionScript

Well, I’ve finally gone and done it – I’ve now got a project on Google code and I now feel like a proper part of the coding community.  We’ll see how long that lasts.  I’ve just uploaded the first version of my AIR ApplicationInfo class, and no doubt I’ll be adding, extending and improving on it in the future – with the added bonus that now I’m not the only one who can contribute.  You can access the project here.

How did I do it?  Well, it’s really all thanks to Internet Duct Tape‘s “Getting Started with Google Code Hosting, Subversion, and TortoiseSVN without feeling like an Idiot” article, which does exactly what it says on the tin.  I got a Google Code project, learnt what the hell TortoiseSVN actually does, and did it all within 10 minutes.

Awesome.

Application Information Class for AIR

by on 1st December, 2008 in ActionScript

Extracting the application information for an AIR application is in some ways a simple process – it’s not like the process is too difficult – it’s a bit of E4X on some data that is readily accessible from the application itself.  But if you’re like me, then repeatedly accessing this information is a bit of a tiresome process.  So, I made a class that can do it for you…

ApplicationInfo, as I’ve so cunningly called it, is a class that gives you information straight from the application descriptor file – including application name, version, description and even the filepaths to the application icons.  I wouldn’t say it’s perfect – projects in their first iterations rarely are – but it’s a start.

Download

Download the ApplicationInfo class.

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Darn them XML namespaces!

by on 1st December, 2008 in ActionScript

Ugh, this E4X stuff is all a bit new to me – I’m still not used to namespaces and stuff.  For some reason I’ve had trouble extracting data from XML when I’m using a namespace.  I have no idea why, but it seemed that with the namespace in use, my attempts at extracting data from the XML returned blank data.

Never fear!  It seems that either removing the namespace or replacing it with a wildcard would let me access the data.  Kudos to the blog posts of Riley (Got RIA?) : Remove Annoying XML Namespaces in Flex / AS3 and Getting around unknown namespaces in Flex / AS3.

So until I get my head around how namespaces work, I’m going to be using the techniques described in the links above.  Until then, if anyone can explain this to me – I’d be very greatful!