AIR Tutorials and News

Back in November we mentioned that Adobe had agreed to work with ARM Holding to push Flash and AIR into ARM chips for TV and Mobile Phones.  Now Adobe have got it on with Intel to get Adobe Flash light built-into the Intel CE3100 chip (which will appear in TV’s, set-top boxes, blu-ray players and other AV devices).

Quoted from the Intel press release:

“Optimizing Adobe Flash Technology on Intel® Media Processor CE 3100 Will Enable Rich and Seamless Web Content on TV…

The high-definition capabilities of the Adobe Flash Platform, together with the Intel® Media Processor CE 3100, the first in a new family of purpose-built Intel System on Chips (SoCs) for CE devices, creates a powerful entertainment hub capable of delivering rich Web content and Adobe Flash based applications to an array of Internet-connected CE devices. Intel and Adobe are working together to optimize both the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Flash Lite™ for the CE3100. Intel plans to ship the first CE3100 with support for an optimized implementation of Adobe Flash Lite before mid-2009...”

Lets hope that the new Flash chips are Flashable

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.

Today Ext LLC, the authors of the popular ExtJS JavaScript Library, released an updated version of Ext.AIR. The update includes many enhancements to sound support, windowing and database. They also include some new features for Ext AIR dealing with notifications, clipboard usage and the file system interactions. Here is a brief introduction to some of the notible features.

Ext.air.MusicPlayer

…supports all of the basic operations, stop, pause, play and skipTo along with supporting events. The MusicPlayer enables the developer to add music and podcasts to their AIR-enabled Ext application very quickly.

Ext.air.Notify

…allows you to notify users that something important has occurred even when your application may not be visible. By displaying these notifications at the operating system level it is sure to get the users attention without being lost within a browser tab.

Window and App API’s

Ext.air.NativeWindow now exposes methods to re-order windows, set a window as always on top, and enable full-screen mode. A new singleton, Ext.air.App will allow you to set your application to start on login and get the currently active window.

Ext.air.Clipboard

…allows you to interact with the system’s clipboard. Developers can determine if a particular format has data, set the data and get the data.

Ext.air.VideoPanel

…enables you to embed flash based video while maintaining the same functionality as an Ext.Panel…You can even watch the video fullscreen in high definition.

It’s still early days for Ext and AIR, but this is a great step to enabling developers to see the full potential of Adobe AIR and JavaScript.

With the above release, ExtJS have bundled in a sample application which uses the new Sound features (mainly). They are calling it ExtPlayer. It runs surprisingly well for a first example, however I could not get the timeline drag to move without the whole player moving too… but it is a great concept player.

ExtPlayer in action.

You can find out more about Ext.Air here

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!

It has been announced that ARM Holdings, one of the largest chip designers, will work with Adobe to bring AIR and Flash 10 to various devices. These include mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, televisions, automotive platforms and personal media players.

The driving force of this partnership stems from an initiative to address the challenges of Web browsing on a broad range of screens, and remove the barriers to publish content and applications seamlessly across screens. Read more about this at: www.openscreenproject.org

The new chip will hopefully be available sometime in late 2009, so there is still plenty of time to learn all you can about AIR

Earlier this week, Adobe announced the release of AIR 1.5. There are 3 highlighted features in this update along with some bug fixes.

Encrypted local database
“While encrypting data in AIR has been possible since AIR 1.0, using the Encrypted Local Store (ELS)—the new encryption support—offers better support for encrypted larger data files and is generally more convenient since many developers prefer to persist using the local database.”

Flash Player 10 capabilities
“We’ve updated the version of Flash Player included with AIR to version 10.”

WebKit update - Squirrelfish
“Our internal tests show that HTML-based AIR applications run as much as 35% faster for many types of operations.”

Major Adobe Authoring software also have available updates to support AIR 1.5, these include Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, Flex Builder 3 and Dreamweaver CS4. There is also an update for Aptana.

Read some more details over at Adobe Dev Center

Just noticed there have been over 25 Million AIR application installations in just 9 months, that is impressive even for Adobe!

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) enables programmers to develop desktop application using web development skills (HTML with JavaScript or Adobe Flex).
Applications created to work with AIR can usually run in Windows, Apple Macs and Linux with little or no modifications.

This website will provide some additional information to help you understand what AIR is, how it can be used, and how to build desktop applications with the AIR SDK (Software Development Kit).

Our first Tutorial

• installation of the AIR SDK (also covers configuration)

We are almost ready to publish our next tutorials. What to expect this week:

• Installation of the Flex SDK
• Creating a Tree component using external XML in Flex for AIR. (the title of this may change)