Flash Player 10 is out … so…

Adobe have just released version 10 of their flash player. Beyond the fact that it’s faster, has better support on Ubuntu and has 3D effects, this release is significant in that it is the first release of the flash player that falls under the openly published SWF format.

It’s also a sign that we’ll  soon get a new version of AIR (1.5) when AIR comes out of Beta for Linux and AIR on the mobile. Watch this space.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , 3d, adobe, air, flash

Is the Google Analytics Reporting Suite About To Launch?

Sticking with the Belgian theme, it looks like the Google Analytics Reporting suite may be about to come out of Beta…

Marketing activity seems to be ramping up and Nicolas Lierman, the creator of this AIR app has set up a LinkedIn Group for people interested in the reporting tool.

I saw a demo and mock ups of the new version at the beginning of April during the AIR tour in Brussels and it is radically different to  (and better than) the current Beta.

You can join the group at www.linkedin.com/e/gis/117224/5B9545647DE2

You can get the latest at www.aboutnico.be

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Software, Web Analytics , air, analytics, belgium, google analytics, nicolas lierman

AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide Released Free Of Charge

Yesterday’s post looked at how Ext JS were using AIR for their library documentation. Today, it’s back to documentation about AIR.

Adobe and O’Reilly have released the AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

It’s free and 204 pages of great material useful for all levels of developers. If you know nothing about AIR, it’ll get you started, but the final chapter, Adobe Air Mini Cookbook is the one that will probably appeal to developers that have a handle on AIR and want to jump straight in to working with databases, figure out how to deploy AIR applications or work with file uploads etc.

Grab it now. It’ll get you a long way down the road to taking all your existing web developer skills and adding desktop applications to your skillset.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Support Articles , Adobe Air, air documentation, air pdf

Adobe AIR Used For Documentation

I was wondering how long it would be before someone did this.

Ext JS have released the documentation for the latest version (Ext JS 2.1) of their JavaScript library as an Adobe AIR download.

This makes a lot of sense and illustrates some of the great strengths of AIR.

All of the Ext JS documentation is already available online, created using HTML and the Ext JS library, so packaging this up an an AIR application wouldn’t have taken much effort. People tend to like working with documents offline so it adds a new advantage for Ext JS over other libraries. But unlike other more traditional means of distributing documentation, this is automatically updateable.

The other key advantage is that the documentation very closely replicates the documentation on Ext JS’s web site so you can happily choose whichever way is most convenient to you at any given time.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Information Management , adobe, air, documentation, extJS 2.1

RegExr, An AIR Regular Expression Builder – Free Fridays #14

What could be better on a Friday afternoon that an dose of regular expressions. Anything I hear you cry. Well of course you’re right, but once you’ve mastered them, regular expressions can save you a lot of time and add power functionality to your applications.

Learn Regular Expressions By Experimenting

RegExr is an excellent tool not only for building and checking regular expressions, but also for learning RegEx because it comes a built in supply of standard RegEx.

The application is divided into 3 main areas as seen in the screenshot below.

1. contains the input field for your RegEx, the switches and flags that you can apply and an area containing text where you can see the effects of your RegEx. You can add what ever text you like to the text area so you can build and test your RegEx using relevant text.

2. contains information a breakdown of the information about your regular experssion, this is useful as RegEx are extremely difficult to read and this area parses the RegEx into it’s individual components.

3. this section is the most useful for beginners to this tricky area of programming. This section contains the store of prebuilt RegEx as well as a short explanation of what each one does. YOu can study these and use them as the basis for your own RegEx.

The application was built in Flex by the Canadian Flash developer Grant Skinner and runs on Air so it’ll work on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download it from gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Fridays, Free Software , adobe, air, Free Software, grant skinner, regex, regexr, regular expressions

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.

Filed under: Adobe Air , adobe, Adobe Air, air, api, ubuntu 8.04, updater, updater api