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Fixed: AIR update framework broken!

Posted by James - 29/01/10 at 10:01:30 pm

Arrgh! All of a sudden the AIR Update Framework stops working.  No explanation, no errors; nothing. Where you’d expect to see your update notification popping up, you get a window just like the one above – no content, just the default Flex blue background colour.

The problem is actually a pretty specific one, but it’s not going to fix itself.  Using the Flex 3.5 SDK and the AIR Update Framework together causes this issue – obviously some part of the Flex SDK has changed between Flex 3.4 and 3.5, and no-one tested the framework before releasing it!  The issue is fixed in Flex 4 and doesn’t occur in anything other than the 3.5 SDK – so upgrading / downgrading is one solution; or…

Hack a solution:

Continue reading Fixed: AIR update framework broken!…

Link: Working with SQLite in AIR, with the help of ORM

Posted by James - 28/01/10 at 09:01:12 am

If you don’t know what ORM is read the next paragraph, and it might help.  If you do, skip to the links below to learn a little more about how you can make ORM work with AIR and SQLite.

ORM stands for Object Relational Mapping, in basic terms the concept of representing your tables-based data as more familiar objects and classes. Not a big concept after all, it’s one that I’ve been using already in my AIR applications – albeit unwittingly and manually.  FlexORM is a project to assist and standardise this process, so it’s worth knowing about and trying out.

Read more about ORM:

http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/october2009/articles/article7/index.html

http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/december2009/articles/article7/index.html

Link: Rendering native system icons in AIR

Posted by James - 22/05/09 at 09:05:43 am

Here’s a cool trick for Adobe AIR – getting native system icons.  So, if you have x application associated with x filetype, you can show the same icon in AIR as you would see on your desktop.  I don’t think it can get you the little preview windows you might get for PDFs or JPGs, whether you can get custom icons (like you’d get on your ‘My Documents’ or ‘My Pictures’ folders) but it’s something cool to check out.

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/stevencarpenter/entry/air_using_native

Print Screen detection in AIR

Posted by James - 17/04/09 at 09:04:06 am

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on recently – Print Screen support in AIR. It has to be AIR because only AIR allows you to access the OS clipboard, and only AIR seems to have access to the full keyboard. There’s a few things I’ve looked at and various snippets of code, so I’ll cover them in roughly the order I figured it all out…

Continue reading Print Screen detection in AIR…

Squiddler

Posted by Mark - 16/03/09 at 11:03:12 am

Squiddler has done some really cool stuff on the Flash platform, most of his blog posts are worth reading but check out these ones specifically:

Bumblebee:
http://www.squidder.com/2008/11/14/bumblebee-the-easiest-path-from-excel-to-xml/
This AIR application is pretty cool – it allows you to take excel files and transform them into xml files by providing a simple template. Could be useful in those instances where we get the client to fill out a spreadsheet of information.

Real-time face recognition:
http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/26/realtime-face-detection-in-flash/

AR drum kit:
http://www.squidder.com/2009/03/03/augmented-reality-drum-kit/

Other posts at:
http://www.squidder.com/

Viewing Flash / Flex / AIR documentation offline with “Doc?”

Posted by James - 04/03/09 at 09:03:17 am

I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages now, but I suppose it’s better late than never…

Doc? is an AIR application that centralizes all of the help documentation in Flash and Flex (and indeed other documentation, if you want) into a single application. It’s darned useful if you want to refer to the documentation without going to the online LiveDocs, or you want to check the documentation without opening Flash/Flex builder (like, if you’re using FlashDevelop). On top of all that, the search is faster and often more accurate than the standard search facility, and the application also looks pretty damn sweet.

There’s even plugins for Doc?, which add the the application search to the Flash IDE and Eclipse. – Which you can see how to install and configure from the plugins page. My only gripe with Doc? is that it has a bit of a user-interaction flaw – after you install the application, it’s useless until you install the documentation. You can learn all about how to configure it from the Doc? FAQ page, and once you’ve done that it works – but for all the cleverness of the application, it gives you no guidance about how to get started, and you have to find it out yourself.

You can download Doc? from the http://airdoc.be/, the dedicated website.

Link: Adobe AIR 1.5.1 released!

Posted by James - 25/02/09 at 10:02:31 am

http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2009/02/adobe_air_151_released.html

Apart from bugfixes, they’ve introduced a new event – InvokeEvent.reason – you can see why your application was started (user interaction, or automatic startup on login), so you can behave accordingly.