Shottts is an AIR application developed for the BlackBerry Playbook Tablet, developed by Mark Starling, of http://markstar.co.uk fame.

Shottts loads and displays a selection of the most recent updates from Dribbble, and displays them in a nice, touch screen interface. I happen to know that earlier desktop versions of the Shottts application were kicking about privately before BlackBerry launched their submit-an-app-get-a-free-Playbook contest, so its nice to see the app finally go live!

And once those Playbook devices go on sale over in the UK, and Mark can actually get his mitts on a physical device, I’m sure we’ll see more application updates. You can read more from Mark about Shottts in his announcement blog post.

If you’ve got a Playbook, I’d suggest you check out Shottts!

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/.

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/

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:

Kudos to Richard Leggett for this solution; you can add an event listener for the StatusUpdateEvent.UPDATE_STATUS event, which includes this code:

try
{
var loader:Object = NativeApplication.nativeApplication.openedWindows[1].stage.getChildAt(0);
loader.content.application.visible = true;
}
catch(e:Error) { trace("Wait till Flex 4!"); }

And this will get things back and working again.

More information:

Read the official bug report in the bug management system.

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