Updating Adobe AIR Applications

One of the great things about developing Adobe AIR applications is that they install very easily and when you need to update them, the AIR runtime handles most of the heavy lifting for you via the Updater API. Also, if the application requires an newer version of the runtime, it will download and install that as well.

Part of the update process is that you the developer have to specify a version number for the update. It’s mandatory, but can take any form you like. The version number is a string variable so you can use and combination of numbers and letters but I’d suggest using the same numbering convention as Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Version Numbering

The linux operating system, Ubuntu uses a simple and fool proof numbering system that increments nicely as a number and also provides some meaningful information.

So how does it work?

At the moment, the current release of Ubuntu is 7.10. that’s because it was released in October (10th month) of 2007, hence the 7. So the pattern is [ YearNumber.MonthNumber ].

Next week, when the new version of Ubuntu is released, it will have the version number 8.04 (April 2008).

But what if you need to update the application several times per month? Just add the day on the end as well like so [ YearNumber.MonthNumberDayNumber ]

So today (17 April 2008) would have the version number 8.0417

Need to release several times per day! Just add the hour in 24 hour notation and so on.

The nice thing about this convention is that you can convert it from a string to numeric type and the newest version will always have the highest number.