Ethan Malasky, from the Adobe AIR engineering team, joined on AIR Tour Europe crew for the first week of the second leg to present on security in Adobe AIR. As an engineer on the AIR team, Ethan can talk about the security model in a way few others can, often giving insight as to why specific decisions were made. Ethan also has access to the source code, and can do fun things like create custom builds with security turned off, and show you the danger of a world without the security model. (more…)
During the AIR Europe Tour event in Brussels, Belgium I was approached by an attendee with a technical question. He wanted to drag and drop video content from the desktop (or presumably other source), and drop it into his application. After the drop operation, he wanted to size the native window to fit the specific content size. This might initially sound pretty easy, but it requires accounting for the OS-specific chrome. There are also some usability questions to consider. (more…)
Many of my Adobe AIR demonstrations show the concept of “script briding” between JavaScript and Flash libraries (i.e. SWC files). Using this feature, JavaScript developers can leverage existing work done by Flash developers in areas that were previously not feasible in the browser. It’s important to recognize however, that the Flash Player itself ships with extensive built in functionality that may be useful as well. I wanted to explore this concept a little further, so I put together a little example that leverages PlotKit and Flash Media Server. (more…)
En route between Madrid, Spain and Paris, France, Lee Brimelow and I got into a somewhat philosophical conversation around why the HTML features are important to Flash developers. The obvious standout is in being able to render HTML content in all its glory. Is there anything beyond that though? What about the script-bridge feature? Being able to reach into the HTML DOM and manipulate it from JavaScript? What we came up with was a visually interesting, if not entirely useful example. (more…)
As I was hanging out in Madrid, getting acclimated for the AIR Europe Tour, I started thinking about what I was going to present - specifically around script bridging. In the United States, I just talked about how Flash and HTML are separate, but can be integrated. I though it would be good to actually show how separate they are in the browser, and contrast that with how integrated they are in Adobe AIR. Several hours spent exploring ideas, and a new demonstration was born. (more…)
We put the wraps on the Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 pre-release user group tour last week. I had the privilege of visiting eight different user groups over two weeks. There’s a lot of new stories to tell, not the least of which is the snow storm that slammed into Milwaukee, WI and Lansing, MI. The real story to developers however is the code, so here’s a walkthrough of the presentation to include a few snippets. (more…)
Two very quiet, yet very important announcements came last week for developers using Adobe AIR. The first is a new “Introspector” for AIR developers using Ajax - think Firebug, but for AIR. The second is an update to Aptana Studio (1.1 required) which provides support for AIR Beta 3. Here’s a quick look at both these updates which should prove very beneficial to those with an HTML workflow. (more…)
Every new update to Adobe AIR means one thing for me - a lot of additional work. When I first started putting together samples for the AIR Pocket Guide, it never occurred to me that I’d have to revisit them time and again. What started as a couple dozen examples has also now grown to be over forty (40) AIR samples, to include a number of full applications. That being said, I’m happy to announce that the samples update for AIR Beta 3 is complete, and are available for download. (more…)
AIR Beta 3 is an exciting release that takes us one step closer to AIR 1.0. Unlike the myriad of changes introduced in the move from AIR Beta 1 to AIR Beta 2, the changes in AIR Beta 3 are far more subtle. While this stability indicates the growing maturity of the product, AIR Beta 3 is an update and will require some changes to your applications. You can read the release notes of course, but in the progress of updating my forty-plus AIR applications, here are the common changes that I encountered. (more…)
The web’s insatiable appetite for upload functionality never ceases to amaze me. What do I mean? My little blog has around 100 posts of technology goodness. In the top five most trafficked posts are twoarticles I’ve done on uploading files. The more popular of the two goes all the way back to the days of Macromedia Central, and I still get random emails about it on a weekly basis. With that in mind, I decided it was time to revisit some of that old code with the latest tools and libraries. (more…)