I have just uploaded a new class to the as3corelib library that makes it easy to monitor files for changes. The class is called FileMonitor, and is in the com.adobe.air.filesystem package. Here is a simple example of it in use: import com.adobe.air.filesystem.FileMonitor; import flash.filesystem.File; import flash.events.Event; import com.adobe.air.filesystem.events.FileMonitorEvent; private var monitor:FileMonitor; private function onSelectButtonClick():void { var f:File = File.desktopDirectory; f.addEventListener(Event.SELECT, onFileSelect); f.browseForOpen("Select a File to Watch."); } private function onFileSelect(e:Event):void { var file:File = File(e.

I am at FITC Amsterdam this week, where I had a talk on Desktop Development with Adobe AIR. One of the things I showed was how to get notifications when new volumes / drives are added / removed to a machine. This could be useful if for example, you application needs to know when a new CD Rom or USB drive has been added or removed to the user’s system.

There is a known issue with the Adobe AIR 1.5 install on Mac where in certain circumstances the install dialog will appear in the wrong language (usually Japanese or Chinese). If you run into this, here are the steps to work around it: Go to System Preferences Select International Make some changes to the Language list: add a language, re-order a language. Also, might want to make sure English is the first one in his list at this point.

One of the top feature requests that end users have been asking for from AIR applications (on Mac) is the ability for those applications to leverage the open source Growl notification framework on Mac. However, this was not previously possible due to how applications are required to communicate with Growl. I am really excited to announce that Adobe has been working with the Growl team to add support to Growl for Adobe AIR and Flash applications.

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).

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.

Here is a simple example that shows how to capture command line arguments passed to a Flex based Apollo application. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" creationComplete="onCreationComplete()"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ private function onCreationComplete():void { //register for the Invoke Event, called whenever //the app is launched or called from the command line Shell.shell.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE, onInvoke); } private function onInvoke(event:InvokeEvent):void { //arguments passed to app are stored as array in event.arguments outputField.text += "Invoke : " + event.

There has been a lot of excitement, interest and discussion around Apollo, especially since we released the public alpha on labs last week. One thing that has come up a couple of times, is confusion over what Apollo is as well as what value it provides. A lot of the discussion has focused on uncertainty about why would you want to move web applications outside of the browser. A lot of times when this question gets answered, the answer focuses on specific Apollo features (file I/O API, working offline).

Most of the docs and examples for the Apollo alpha are Flex / ActionScript focused (next beta will be more focused on HTML / JavaScript). However, you can build Apollo applications using just HTML and JavaScript. Here is a simple example that shows how to build an HTML / JavaScript Apollo application, and how to access Apollo APIs from JavaScript. The application shows how to launch a file browser from the application, and access information about the selected file (you could then easily read in the contents of the file).

I have put together a very simple example of how to download and cache items to the files system. This can be useful if your application needs to work offline, or if you want to optimize performance and don’t want to have to keep downloading the same assets over and over. This example uses some of the caching classes from my Ascension mp3 player, and required the corelib library. Here is the code for the app: