AIR Tutorials and News

On Monday, Huw from SapphireSteel Software, announced the forthcoming release of ‘Amethyst’ - an IDE for Adobe Flex and AIR.

Amethyst will come as a free Personal addition or a commercial version (released later).

UPDATE: The Beta version is now available for download.

Free Personal Edition:

“Amethyst Personal is a free Flex/AIR IDE which will provide a project management, editing, building and launching environment for Flex/AIR/ActionScript. This will be completely free and may optionally be installed into the free Visual Studio ‘shell’ edition.”

Professional Edition:

“Amethyst Professional will provide a drag+drop visual design environment for Flex and AIR. The visual designer will integrate with Visual Studio’s Toolbox, Property panels and code editor to provide a seamless design-and-code experience which will be familiar to C# and VB developers…..”

They expect to release the Personal Edition next week, and the Professional edition should be available in a few months.

Could this really be an alternative to the Adobe Flex Builder? only time will tell.

I recently released an AIR application called ‘Snippet Manager‘ which was build using Flex (in a basic text editor, not Flex Builder). Today I decided to see if it would work on Linux. I’m happy to report snippet manager works just as well as it does in Windows.

Here are the steps I used to install Adobe AIR on Linux (Ubuntu).

Note: On my system, I used VM Player (the Free Virtual Machine Player) inside Windows XP. I then downloaded a Linux Ubuntu 8.10 image (I got mine from vmplanet.net).

Step 1
Download the latest Adobe AIR Installer for Linux. At the time of writing, the Adobe AIR for Linux is in Beta.

Download Adobe AIR Linux Installer

Download the Linux install file from: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air_linux.html

If your browser is set to download files to your desktop (FireFox default on Ubuntu), you should see something like this:

Air Installer file on Linux Desktop

Step 2
The next thing to do is find out your installer files location path. You can do this by right clicking on the file and selecting ‘Properties’. You should see something like this:

AIR Installation File Location

On my system, the file location is /home/vmplanet/Desktop/adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin - the chances are the ‘vmplanet’ part of the path will be your own username.

Step 3 and 4
Now we need to change the file permissions (this could probably be done in the properties window, but we will do it in a terminal just to be sure!)

Open a terminal window (select terminal from the applications list). Type in the following command to change to the same directory as the installation file:

cd /home/vmplanet/Desktop

(you will probably need to change the path a little to match your own)

Now to change the file permissions, type:

chmod 777 adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

The final step will execute the installer file (installs Adovbe AIR). In your terminal window, type:

./adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

then press enter. The . (dot) at the front of your path is required!

Installing AIR on Linux Command Window

You should now have Adobe AIR installed and ready on your Linux box.

To test it out, try installing our Snippet Manager application

Sitepen, the authors of the popular open source javascript library Dojo, have released a new set of extentions specifically designed for Adobe AIR.

Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR is available right now.

Sample Application:

“Created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe®, the Dojo Toolbox was developed using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe® AIR™. The Dojo Toolbox offers a great user experience and simplifies your creation of amazing web applications.”

They have created the entire API using the namepace of ‘dair’ (I image that is: Dojo Adobe Integrated Runtime, but don’t quote me on that!), you can use:
dair.AIR, dair.Console, dair.Window, dair.Application, dair.fx, dair.Sound, dair.Video, dair.Icon and dair.File. They will be releasing dair.Chrome pretty soon too.

Dojo is release under the Open Source BSD-license…. Nice!

The first video below shows how simple it is to install the AIR SDK.

• Step one: In google, search for ‘adobe air sdk’
• Step two: Select the second result www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
• Step three: Download the files for you Operating System (currently Mac OSX or Windows)
• Step four: Extract all the files from the downloaded zip file to a folder on your local machine (for example: c:\air\)

Note: The download file will be zipped-up, you can use something like winzip or winrar to extract the files.

This second part shows how to configure the program.

• Step one: Right Click on ‘My Computer’
• Step two: Select ‘Properties’
• Step three: Select the ‘Advanced’ tab
• Step four: Select the ‘Environment Variables’ button
• Step five: Select ‘New’ under the ‘System Variables’ section
• Step six: Enter ‘adl’ in the ‘variable name’ field and ‘c:\air\bin\adl.exe’ in the ‘variable value’ field.
• Step seven: Click OK
• Step eight: Enter ‘adt’ in the ‘variable name’ field and ‘c:\air\bin\adt.bat’ in the ‘variable value’ field.
• Step nine: Click OK
• Step ten: Restart your computer so the changes will take effect

The above steps will now allow you to call the commands ‘adl’ and ‘adt’ from any directory.
This make things easier when developing applications as you do not have to specify the full path
each time you call ‘adl’ or ‘adt’.

Note: Installing the AIR SDK will allow you to run and compile applications, however it will not register the standard AIR runtime on your system which is required to install AIR applications. Visit the Adobe website and get the AIR runtime.