Adobe AIR

Extending AIR for Android

*** The following is totally unsupported by Adobe *** *** UPDATE: Adobe has officially added native extensions to AIR. I highly recommend you use that approach instead of mine. *** Adobe AIR provides a consistent platform for desktop and mobile apps. While consistency is very important there are times when developers need to extend beyond the common APIs. This article will walk you through how to integrate AIR for Android applications with other native APIs and functionality in the Android SDK.

P2P in Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet Flex Apps

Using the open source Flex SDK, developers can easily build desktop, mobile, and tablet applications that use Peer to Peer (P2P) communication. I’ve created a video that walks through demos and code illustrating how to use the P2P APIs in Adobe AIR applications. Check it out: Grab the code for the demos in the video from github: P2Pong P2Hancock (Signature capture over P2P) Just as the video shows, it’s incredibly easy to use the P2P APIs.

Install Adobe AIR on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10

Right now Adobe AIR is only officially available for 32-bit Linux. But it does work on 64-bit Linux with the 32-bit compatibility libraries. There are several ways to install Adobe AIR on Linux. My preferred way on Ubuntu is to use the .deb package. However the .deb package distributed by Adobe can only be installed on 32-bit systems. Good news is that this can be easily fixed! To install the Adobe AIR .

Building Client / Cloud Apps with Flash Builder for Force.com

I have a theory. The majority of people who use enterprise software today use old school Client / Server apps. We’ve been trying to move these apps to the web for more than ten years. The ease of deployment of web apps is a clear motivator. Yet the client capabilities of the plain old web browser have not been sufficient for many apps to make the leap. This is why I love Flex and the Flash Platform.

Tour de Flex 2.0 – Nearly 500 Flex Examples!

Adobe has just launched the new AIR 2 based Tour de Flex version 2.0 which now contains almost 500 Flex examples! The new version has new AIR 2 examples (only available in the AIR version of Tour de Flex) including: File Promises Mass Storage Detection Native Process Open with default app Socket Server Also there are some great examples of the new Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 APIs including:

Flex on Android in Flash Player and AIR

This week at the Google I/O conference Adobe announced that a Flash Player 10.1 beta and an Adobe AIR prerelease are now available for Android devices. This is really exciting news for those of us building apps on the Flash Platform because now we can begin building apps in Flex for these mobile devices (and many others coming soon). Take a look a some of the quick demos I’ve built with Flex running on Android in Flash Player and AIR:

Time to Update to Flex SDK 3.5a

If you are using a Flex SDK before 3.5a then it’s probably time to update. Flex SDKs before 3.4 have a security vulnerability. I believe the problem is actually in the HTML template, so when you update make sure that you also update the HTML templates that you are using. The Flex SDK 3.4 had the double responder bug. And the initial release of Flex SDK 3.5 had a bug with AIR’s ApplicationUpdaterUI.

Exciting Flash Platform Advancements

Recently there has been a number of exciting advancements with the Flash Platform (Flex, Flash Player, and Adobe AIR). Here is a quick round-up: Adobe released security updates for the Flash runtimes: Flash Player 10.0.42.34 and Adobe AIR 1.5.3. The Flash Player update fixes an issue with mouse scroll wheels not working in Flash when using Safari. Recently, Adobe also released public betas for Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.