Mike Chambers

Adobe AIR based eBay Desktop hits 1 Million downloads

2008-07-17T23:55:24Z

Read about it here and here.

Congrats to the eBay team that worked on this.

ADT Error Codes

2008-07-14T16:36:41Z

Just a quick fyi, but we have just posted a technote with a list of error codes and their meaning from the ADT tool (inside the Adobe AIR SDK).

You can find the technote here.

Updated turl : command line url shortener (with bit.ly support)

2008-07-10T16:55:04Z

Just a quick note, but I update turl last night. turl is a command line tool for Mac OS X that uses online services to shorten urls.

There are a couple of minor changes, but the main new feature is that I added support for bit.ly. Here are the changes:

Added support for bit.ly
Made bit.ly service default (urltea appears to be down / gone)
Add some error checking to make sure a URL is returned

You can download turl, and the source from here.

Adobe AIR / Firefox issue on Vista

2008-07-09T23:25:36Z

One of the issue mentioned in our the Adobe AIR 1.1 release notes is an issue where Firefox is not used as the default web browser on Vista. From the technote:

On Windows Vista, web pages opened from AIR applications (this is done by calling the navigateToURL() method) may not open the default browser; it always opens Internet Explorer. To workaround this problem, go to Start > Default Programs > Set Program Access and Computer Defaults. Expand the Custom section, select the option next to the application you want to set as the system-wide default browser (for example, Mozilla Firefox), and then click OK.

As the note mentions, this is an issue on Vista. We are working on narrowing down the issue, and it looks like it has something to do with some changes around registry settings in Vista.

If you have run into the issue, could you take a second and answer the following questions in the comments:

Are you running on Vista?
Are you running with admin privledges?
Do you have UAC (Universal Access control) enabled?
Is Firefox set as your default browser?
If you go to a command prompt and type “start http://www.google.com”, which browser opens?
Are you running on Firefox 3

This will help us confirm what we think the issue is (as well as whether it is an AIR, Mozilla and / or Vista issue).

Ill update the post as I get more info. Also, please keep the comments on topic for this post.

as3corelib update

2008-07-02T17:35:58Z

One of the ActionScript 3 libraries that I use in just about every project I work on is the as3corelib library. This is an ActionScript 3 library that contains a lot of useful APIs for working with AS3.

I am planning to do some more work the library this week. I spent the morning scrubbing and fixing some bugs, and plan to fix more issues, as well as generate new docs and a new SWC.

So, if you have any bugs, issues, or feature requests for the library, please log them on the project site as soon as possible.

If you have questions about the library, then check out the as3corelib mailing list.

Open Review : Getting Started with AIR Chapter

2008-06-30T21:58:29Z

I have posted chapter 2 of the Adobe AIR for Flex Developers Pocketguide on tostring.org. The chapter is titled Getting Started with Adobe AIR Development and covers (from the chapter):

Installing Adobe AIR
Configuring the Flex SDK and command-line tools
Creating your first AIR application with the Flex SDK and Flex Builder 3
Testing AIR applications
Signing, packaging, and deploying AIR applications

This is just a draft chapter (.85) and I am looking for any comments, input, questions or suggestions on the chapter. If you have any input, just leave a comment on the chapter page.

Adobe AIR 1.1 Release Notes in HTML

2008-06-30T17:39:26Z

Just a quick note, but we have posted the Adobe AIR 1.1 Release Notes in HTML. Previously they were only available via PDF.

There is a lot of useful and important information in the release notes about developing in AIR 1.1, so make sure to check them out.

Introducing tostring.org : AIR / Flash Player / RIA books online

2008-06-23T20:41:07Z

Prior to the release of Adobe AIR 1.0, I worked on two books about Adobe AIR (then know by its code name of “Apollo”). The books, “Adobe Integrated Runtime for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide” and “Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocketguide” provided an introduction to Adobe AIR, and all of the information a developer would need to get over the hump of developing for Adobe AIR.

In addition to being published by O’Reilly, we released both books online under a Creative Commons license. We were not sure what effect, if any this would have on the book or community, but were pleasantly surprised when the community began to translate and republish the books online in different languages (including Russia, French and Japanese).

Introducing tostring.org

When I began to work on the updated “Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide” for Adobe AIR 1.0, I wanted to provide a way to help support anyone in the community who wanted to give back to the community by translating the books. Well, I am happy to announce a new site that I have been working on called tostring.org, which in addition to containing the entire Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide online, also provides an infrastructure for the community to contribute to the books, both through hosting translated versions of the books, as well as allowing comments on individual chapters.

The first chapter of the book has already been translated to German, and there are community members working on translating the book to Swedish and Polish.

The site is still in beta as I work out some kinks, and clean up the CSS, but it is pretty much fully functional now. I plan to start converting and posting the “Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocketguide” to the site, and then updating it to AIR 1.1. After that, I am thinking about publishing some mini books on the site that do deep dives into specific AIR and Flash Player APIs and functionality.

Why does this matter to you? Well, if you dont care about Adobe AIR, RIAs or the Flash Platform, then it probably doesn’t. But, at a minimum, it now makes it easier to reference / search the book content online. In addition, if you find an issue, or something isn’t clear, you can leave a comment on the chapter to clarify or get clarification.

However, the thing I am most excited about is the potential to start getting more content localized and translated into non-English languages. If you are interested in translating a chapter into a non-English language, then check out the translating page on the site, which describes how to translate a chapter.

Note, that all content on the site is released under Creative Commons licenses, which in essence means that this is the community’s site, and the books are the community’s books. Hopefully, this will help support the community, and generate all around better resources for developers.

Visit tostring.org.

Leave any comments, questions, suggestions or offers of help in the comments.

Fun with a Flip Cam and a Train Toilet

2008-06-16T12:07:53Z

View the video here.

Base64 Encoding and Decoding in JavaScript in Adobe AIR

2008-06-12T21:20:01Z

I have been working on a JavaScript AIR app for the past week or so while on the on AIR Tour in Europe, and ran into the need to Base64 encode some data. I knew that there were some JavaScript libraries that did this, and I could also create a SWF library that used the Flex Base64Encoder class. However, I didnt like either of these solutions as I was concerned about performance with using a JavaScript implementation, and didnt want to hassle with creating a SWF library to link into JavaScript.

Well, after some searching on Google, I discovered that webkit has native Base64 encoding and decoding functions, respectively named btoa and atob.

Here is how you can use them from JavaScript:

var s = "foo";
var encoded = btoa(s);
var decoded = atob(encoded);
window.runtime.trace(s);
window.runtime.trace(encoded);
window.runtime.trace(decoded);

This outputs:

foo
Zm9v
foo

Among other things, this can come in handy if you need to create custom HTTP authentication headers.

You can find more information on the apis here.