Mike Chambers

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Two of the most requested features for Adobe AIR have been the ability to launch native executables from an AIR application, and the ability to integrate native libraries into an AIR application. Unfortunately, neither feature will be included in Adobe AIR 1.0.

However, this does not mean that you cannot build an AIR application that has closer / tighter integration with the underlying operating system. This lower level of integration is possible, but it requires some work on your part. I have put together a proof of concept project, which shows how to integrate Adobe AIR applications with c# / .NET code on any operating system that Adobe AIR currently runs on (Mac and Windows). The project is called CommandProxy. It provides a communication proxy between an AIR application and the underlying operating system and could theoretically work with other web based desktop runtimes (such as Mozilla Prism).

Update : I have posted some additional thoughts on this proof of concept here.
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I just noticed over on the labs wiki that the Adobe AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide has been translated to Thai.

You can view the full translation here.

Creative Commons FTW!

If you have been following Adobe AIR during its young lifetime, then you have probably noticed that it has been pretty inconsistent as far as branding goes. It has had a number of logos and graphics associated with it, including the rocket-ship, and the current “AIR” branding.

Part of this was due to the surprisingly complex process of designing and settling on a logo in the technology world. There have been quite a few times during the past year where we felt that we were close to having the final logo, only to then find out that it was just a bit too familiar to some other logo in the computer / internet / tech world.

Well, I am happy to say that we have the final logo. I had the honor of showing it for the first time today, at the Adobe User group meeting in Paris.
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One of the cool features of Adobe AIR (especially for Flash developers) is its ability to render full featured HTML within Flash content. The rendering is handled by the WebKit core, and the HTML content can be from both local and remote URLs as well as from a string of HTML text.

HTML rendering within Flash content is handled by the ActionScript HTMLControl class (which is wrapped by the HTML component in Flex). The HTMLControl class is a DisplayObject instance (it directly inherits from Sprite) and thus renders its HTML directly to the display list.

However, it is possible to load HTML content into an HTMLControl instance, without placing it on the display list to be displayed. HTML content is still loaded and executed, and its DOM is exposed to the scripting environment. This means that you can essentially use the HTMLControl to load and parse HTML with the sole purpose of retrieving data from the HTML… i.e. using the HTMLControl you can treat HTML as a data source, as if it was XML.
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One of the things that you might need to do when building your application is detecting whether your application has run before. This can be useful if you need to initialize settings, or perhaps prompt the user with some information.

Below is a simple example that shows how to detect whether the application has run before. Basically, it checks for the existence of a file. If it doesn’t exist, then the app hasn’t run before, if it does exist, then it means that app has run.
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Here is a simple example that shows how to enable your Adobe AIR application to accept native drag and drop operations.

This is a simple application that allows you to drag a text file into the application and then view its contents.
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As part of my Flash on the Beach Intro to AIR Session, I built a simple HTML Editor with a live preview. I have added comments to the code, and uploaded it to the on AIR tour google repository.

This example demonstrates:

• Using the File API to write a string to a file
• Using the HTML Control within an application to render a string of HTML
• Using the File.browseForSave API to open a native save dialog.

Here is the code if you just want to glance at it:
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A lot of people have been asking whether the Adobe AIR beta currently works on Apple Leopard (OS X 10.5). I pinged the team and they they told me that they are currently doing some testing, and havent run into any major issues yet. However, we are seeing some reports of issues from developers online, so if you are currently working on an AIR app, you might want to wait a little while to upgrade until we have more information.

I installed AIR on Leopard, and all of my apps ran fine (although there were some minor issues with badge install).

I don’t have any information on Flex Builder, but I will try and install it and see if it works for me.

ars technica has an interview up with Ed Finkler, the developer behind the AIR based Spaz Twitter client (which was one of the winners of the AIR Developer Derby).

The interview is a good read and why Ed (an HTML / PHP developer) choose AIR, and what his experience was like working with the runtime. It also gives a good explanation of some of the new HTML / JavaScript security changes that were implimented in Beta 2.

You can read the entire article here.