Kevin Hoyt

One of the questions I encountered regularly during the AIR Bus Tour was about encryption using AIR. There’s an obvious sensitivity towards having an application remember certain details (like passwords) about the user, and then storing that data in the clear in a text file. During AIR Beta 1, I suggested that folks use one of the various ActionScript encryption libraries. I’m happy to report that AIR Beta 2 includes an “encrypted local store” for developers to use.
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The first MAX Europe has come and gone, and I’m super-thrilled to have been a part of it. I had a number of hands-on presentations, all around developing and deploying AIR applications. I also had two speaking sessions, one on using Aptana for AIR development, and one on script-bridging with AIR. Following is a recap of the session contents for each, and any assets that were created.
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It is unfortunate but true that the HTML control in AIR Beta 2 does not yet support Flash content. Depending on the requirements of your application however, you shouldn’t let this stop you from using Flash content in your HTML-based AIR application. Huh? It’s important to remember that the HTML control is integrated, and indeed part of the very display pipe that is the Flash Player in AIR. To demonstrate this I put together a very simply Flash Video (FLV) player using HTML, JavaScript and AIR.
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Flash Remoting. The product now more commonly referred to simply as “remoting” is woven deep into the very fabric of many of Adobe’s technologies. It’s available in ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services on the server. Of course you know you can use it from Flash and therefore Flex on the client. Did you know however, that this also extends to JavaScript in AIR?
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Monday I set out to build a desktop Flash Video player using HTML, JavaScript and AIR. When I assumed the size of the video to be played, I was able to knock the project out in just a few hours. On Tuesday I decided that playing a specific sized video wasn’t good enough, so on Wednesday, I set out allow my player window to resize to a user-selected video. And that’s where my problems began.
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I was very happy this year to be so heavily involved in MAX sessions. The attendance at the conference and those sessions was amazing. With a few exceptions, I heard a lot of positive remarks about presenters and their content. I’m already looking forward to next year in San Francisco, CA. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the sessions, and their related content.
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A big congratulations to Alexey Gavrilov over at Metalink, who published his first article on DevX. He does a great job of covering Silverlight, AIR and JavaFX as broadly and as fairly as possible. My only complaint is that he chose Flex as the basis for his AIR application. AIR supports both Flash/Flex and HTML workflow’s, and to that end, I’ve stepped up to provide the missing HTML version of the stopwatch example application used in his article.
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Par for the course this year, Adobe MAX 2007 has some pre-event sessions, which includes a number of day-long hands-on sessions. For a while there was only one session for AIR, and that was for the Flex developer. After talking with Ted Patrick and other MAX organizers, I was able to arrange a similar session, but for the HTML and JavaScript developers!
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The second leg of the on AIR Bus Tour came to a conclusion last week in Boston, MA. Once again, we were blown away by the numbers of HTML/JavaScript developers in attendance (an average of 50% of the audience at each event). Imagine my surprise then, when I found out that there has been an astoundingly low number of HTML/JavaScript entries for the AIR Developer Derby!
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The second leg of three for the on AIR Bus Tour is drawing to a close. The crew is in Philadelphia, PA now, with Boston to go at the end of the week. During this leg of the tour I’ve been showing off some new samples, the most popular of which seems to b applying Flash bitmap filters to HTML elements in AIR. In this walkthrough, I’ll cover some of the techniques I use to blur the line between Flash and HTML.
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