Mike Chambers

Dr Dobb’s Journal has posted an article on Adobe AIR in this months (November 2007) issue. It is written by Oliver Goldman, who is one of the primary engineers on the AIR team, and provides a good overview of what AIR is, and the problems that it tries to solve.

You can read the entire article online here.

Here is a quick tip, that I got from Tom Lane on the Flex Builder team. If you do a lot of AIR development, then you have probably noticed that the default application descriptor file in Flex Builder 3 Beta 2, is heavily commented. While this makes it easy to learn the new tags, it can be a little overwhelming, and make it difficult to find the actual tags you need.

Luckily, there is an easy way to edit the default template for the file. Note, this is not supported and subject to change in the future.
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I just uploaded a new build of Ascension that works with the current Adobe AIR beta (Sorry it took so long).

You can download the AIR file, as well as the source from the Ascension google code project page.

Over on the on AIR bus tour blog, I just posted about a new app that Lee Brimelow and I put together on the bus, called flump.

It is a simple AIR application that will download all of the public images from a Flickr account.

You can find more information, as well as download the app from here (source included).

I just posted on the on AIR Bus Tour weblog that we have opened up the code repository for the tour. We will be posting all of the applications for the tour here and have already included two:

• AIRSnapshot Application: AIR application that takes a picture from the webcam, geoencodes it and uploads to Flickr.
• AIRTracker Application: AIR application which takes geo-coordinates, maps then, and uploads them to a server API

You can find more information over at the on AIR Tour weblog.

In one of the projects I am working one with the Adobe AIR bus tour, I had a need to serialize instance of File class to the file system. Normally you can do this with File.writeObject(), but as the player serializer / de-serializer does not know about the File class, this would not work for me.

I came up with a simple solution that I wanted to share. Basically, you need to extend the File class and provide the meta data for it to tell the player how to serialize and de-serialize the class. This will then allow it to be serialized to the file system.

Here is the code:
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Just a quick fyi, but I just made a post over on the on AIR Bus tour blog about some of the GPS / Location / AIR App / API testing we are doing for the bus tour.

I think it is some pretty cool stuff, and it is definately a LOT of fun.

You can view the entire post here.

I just finished up a book I have been working on (along with Kevin Hoyt and Danny Dura) that covers using JavaScript and HTML to build Apollo applications. In celebration of finally writing my last example, I wanted to post it here.

Here is a simple example that shows how to use Flash Player and ActionScript APIs directly from JavaScript to play a sound in the upcoming Apollo beta.
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Google announced their Google Gears project today which uses SQLite to allow browser based applications to work off-line. (Ryan and JD have more info on that). Part of the announcement was that the upcoming beta of Apollo will also include SQLite to allow developers access to an embedded database for their applications.

This has probably been the #1 request we have heard from developers since we release the alpha, and with a tons of help from the Flex team, we were able to add it.

We will be releasing more information once the Apollo beta is public on labs (sooner rather than later).

Update: I meant to add that we are working on aligning the Apollo DB and Gears DB apis, with the goal of making it easier to build applications and code that can leverage both API implementations (on the desktop and in the browser).

Christian Cantrell has released and open sourced an Amazon S3 ActionScript 3 Library. This can be used to send and retrieve items to an from the Amazon S3 storage service from an Apollo application.

We posted a video of Christian showing of an appliction that uses the API a couple of weeks ago.

You can find more information here.