Archives For Adobe AIR

An article I wrote for Peachpit Press titled Building AIR Application Menus with the MenuBuilder Framework was just published at Peachpit’s Web site. In this article I discuss how the MenuBuilder JavaScript framework can be used to easily turn an XML file into an AIR application’s menus.

An article I wrote entitled Using jQuery to Customize Your Adobe AIR Application has just been published online at Peachpit Press’s Web site.. You can read it at http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1326510. The article shows a handful of practical ways jQuery can be used in an Adobe AIR application, although some of the information covered is much more about jQuery than it is about Adobe AIR (i.e., much of the content is applicable to Web development, too).

My First Foray into Flex

January 24, 2009

One of my hopes for my (which is, tragically, starting to fill up with actual work) is to learn Flex. In case you’re not familiar with it, Flex is an open source framework created by Adobe, used to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Flex can be used to create SWF files that run through the Flash engine in a Web browser or create AIR files that run through the AIR engine on the desktop. Simply put, Flex is Flash for programmers. As I have little to no graphical skills, it’s a much better candidate for me than Flash. Over the past week I’ve started to finally do something wth Flex, here are my thoughts thus far. Continue Reading…

A new version of Adobe AIR–version 1.5–was released in mid-November in conjunction with the 2008 Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco (it was originally released for Windows and Mac OS X, a Linux version came out a few weeks later). I’ll talk about the features of this new version in a separate post but I wanted to quickly mention what your AIR application’s end user will see when the framework is updated. Continue Reading…

Someone pointed out in a forum posting that there was a problem with Script 9.4 of my Adobe AIR with Ajax: Visual QuickPro Guide (View at Peachpit.com). Script 9.4 lists the items in a directory (a folder on the user’s computer). By clicking on the name of any item, that item will be moved to the user’s trash. Then the script removes and rebuilds the list of items. I’m not sure if this is due to a change in AIR 1.5 or not, but the problem is that after deleting an item and the list is rebuilt, clicking on any other item no longer works. The solution I came up with may actually be better than the original script (in fact, it probably is). The solution is to remove the specific item that was deleted from the list, instead of deleting and rebuilding the entire list. Continue Reading…