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it’s easy once you know how.

Link: Icon Generator Pro

Posted by James - 12/05/10 at 09:05:14 am

I love this application, Icon Generator Pro.  It’s simple, but sometimes that’s a good thing in an application, means it has focus – if you’re going to do something, do it properly – that’s one of the benefits of AIR, it makes it simple to create applications just like this.

What the application actually does is just generate images in a few specific formats, output the files (in a format useful for your own AIR applications) and even, from the looks of it, replace your Twitter icon with your new file.

If you haven’t seen the earlier version of this application, its still available from the AIR Marketplace [link], and the newer version, Icon Generator Pro is available from http://icon-generator.net/.

Link: Voice synthesis in Adobe AIR 2.0

Posted by James - 09/04/10 at 08:04:27 am

Here’s another cool library for AIR applications.  It works for both Windows and Mac environments, and uses the NativeProcess access of AIR version 2 to tap into the built-in voice synthesis functionality of the operating system.  It’s still in development, is more developed for Mac than for Windows (at the moment) but it’s looking pretty good already.

Should be a good one to have a play with soon!

Read the authors’ blog post here: http://blog.technolog33k.fr/adobe-air/20-12-2009-voice-synthesis-in-adobe-air-with-the-nativeprocess-api/

Access the source code for the library from the Google code repository here: http://code.google.com/p/nativespeech/

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/