Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

Just how easy can you make an AIR application installation?

Posted by James - 23/08/08 at 10:08:54 pm

Well, if you’re using the AIR Install Badge - as Greg Wilson demonstrates - it can be surprisingly easy. The Install Badge handles the launching of your application (if you have it already installed), the installation of your application (if you have the AIR framework installed), and the installation of the AIR framework and the subsiquent installation of your application if you have neither.

The whole Flash / AIR auto-updater can be a pain to sort out when you do it yourself, but the result is very efficent from the end-users’ perspective.  Lucky then that the Install Badge template has this sorted for you.

When the ‘AIR framework requirement’ is a hurdle for getting clients to adopt an AIR solution, the ability to auto-install the AIR framework is a powerful arguement…

See Greg Wilson’s post here: http://gregorywilson.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/air-install-badge-use-it/

10 Adobe AIR Apps for Web Designers

Posted by James - 21/08/08 at 09:08:52 am

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/adobe_air_apps_web_designers/

BBC Sports’ AIR Application removes its offensive language

Posted by James - 05/08/08 at 04:08:07 pm

Well, that was fast (and rightly so).  This morning I posted about the BBC Sports’ Olympics AIR Application containing a text file of offensive language but now, roughly 1.5 hours after posting here, and 6.5 hours after it being initally posted, a new update has appeared for the Olympics AIR Application.

The release notes mention that it’s updating the listing events schedule (which it may well be) but it’s also changing the contents of the bbc-swear.txt file to say ‘deprecated functionality‘. (Instead of 1399 ways to swear.)

Continue reading BBC Sports’ AIR Application removes its offensive language…

BBC uses Adobe AIR to install a list of swear words to users machines.

Posted by James - 05/08/08 at 10:08:35 am

James Cannings from MMT Digital alerted me to this, and has written a post about it at: http://www.mmtdigital.co.uk/monkeymagic, and here’s my thoughts on it:

You can install the BBC Sport’s Desktop Monkey at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/monkey/7479984.stm

If you do however, you’ll be unwittingly installing a rather comprehensive list of offensive words as a plain text file to your hard drive. Once it’s installed, go to your application directory (Program Files) and BBC Olympics > assets > data > bbc-swear.txt
and you’ll be privvy to a 15kb, 1399 lines long list of bad words.

This is such an ridiculous error that I’m practically lost for words. For an audience as big as the BBC’s you think they’d be mindful about offending people – every other part of the development must have undergone a review process – but bundling a highly offensive text file with your application?

Continue reading BBC uses Adobe AIR to install a list of swear words to users machines….

Adobe AIR gets serious?

Posted by James - 18/06/08 at 11:06:16 pm

Adobe have just released their first major update to AIR since its release, Adobe AIR 1.1 (catchy!). - The release notes of which you can read here.

Aside from a few tweaks and general updates, and a few requested features making an appearance, the focus for most people seems to be the multilingual capabilities. There’s a whole 10 new languages supported.

Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

Strangely enough, that’s not very exciting. Well, I guess it makes up a large proportion of the target markets, and covers most of the character sets - but 10 languages seems a little low. Meh.

Continue reading Adobe AIR gets serious?…

Adobe AIR is…

Posted by James - 13/04/08 at 12:04:08 pm

Just what Adobe AIR is, is an unusual concept. But I think I’m getting the hang of it.

Adobe AIR is not…

Adobe AIR is not a direct replacement for Adobe Director, and in that respect not a competitor to products like MDM Zinc. Macromedia / Adobe has been pretty unenthusiastic about keeping Director on par with its other products in the last 4 years and oh, how we wish it weren’t so. Nevertheless, AIR is not aimed at replacing Director.

Adobe AIR is…

the best parallel is probably the .net framework that Microsoft creates and distributes. An AIR file can’t function without the AIR runtime, and neither can it be installed. The same is true of applications and services that leverage the .net framework. Luckily, for end users, the .net framework often comes with your application (or if you’re even luckier, via Automatic Updates) Lucky for AIR then, that you can do the same thing.
Continue reading Adobe AIR is……

AIR files downloading as .zips?

Posted by James - 11/04/08 at 10:04:05 pm

Well, here’s a mercifully easy to solve problem with Adobe AIR.

A couple of people pointed out that Internet Explorer was saving my .air download files as .zip format - even going so far as to change the filename extension to .zip. (Firefox is fine, and doesn’t do this.) AIR packages are based on the Zip format, so the file contents itself aren’t actually being changed - but when the end user recieves the file, this is going to change the application that handles the file on their local machine.

Continue reading AIR files downloading as .zips?…