OK, I hear so much about Adobe Air., I have to try it out. Air is Adobe's way of letting us build rich desktop applications.

The unfortunate thing about using Air is ... well, the cost. It looks as if you can get the Air runtime and the SDK for free, but Flex Builder 3 costs. And I think you really need Flex Builder 3 to do anything for real.

Flex Builder 3 is an Eclipse plugin, but it's not clear from the Adobe site what versions of Eclipse are supported.

• http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flex_eclipse&loc=en_us says Eclipse 3.3 or higher. Does this include 3.6M4? I doubt it.
  
  
• http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/systemreqs/ lists Eclipse 3.4 as the highest version.

You can get Flex Builder as a standalone (I guess it comes with an integrated eclipse) or as a plugin (but you can't move beyond Eclipse 3.4).

Even worse, Adobe says that Flex Builder does not work on Snow Leopard (http://www.adobe.com/support/OScompatibility.html ) ... or is not tested on Snow Leopard. The web seems contradictory on this point.

Even so, Flex Builder is a deprecated term. The new deal is Flash Builder. I went to this website: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/.

So I'm going to try and install the beta 2. There's a 60-day time limit on this beta. This is also unfortunate. Flex or Flash Builder is just too expensive for me to use.

Reading This Book

I'm reading Teach Yourself Adobe Air Programming in 24 Hours by Michael Givens. Now I know that the Teach Yourself series gets a lot of bad press on the net ... comments like it takes a lifetime to become a software engineer or how a little knowledge is dangerous or other such pompous comments. It is an unfortunate naming convention ... agreed, you can't learn Adobe Air, Java, C++ or anything else for that matter in 24 hours. But these books are structured as a series of short exercises, each with a clear solution. They take you through installing, configuring, and running simple examples. They're like “get up and running” books, and I like them.

Here's my complaint, though. It's the latest book I could find (2009 copyright), but it still discuses Flex Builder 3, which as much as I can figure out is a defunct name and a defunct version.

Downloads and Installation

You know every time I go to the Adobe site and download something, it seems I often go to a different place.

Here is what I downloaded (Note the dmg extensions ... I'm on a Mac Book Pro with Snow Leopard).

• Get the Adobe Air runtime (AdobeAIR.dmg) from http://get.adobe.com . Double click on AdobeAIR.dmg to install it.
  
  
• Get the Adobe Air SDK from http://www.adobe.com/products/air/ to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=airsdk. Double click on AdobeAIRSDK.dmg to install it. When you do this, you don't get a wizard. Rather you see a window with a bunch of folders. I copied those folders to ~ted/Adobe and then put ~ted/Adobe/bin in my path.

You know you got it installed correctly if you type adl (this stands for Adobe Debug Launcher) and you find it. Like ...

newtricks:Adobe ted$ adl
application descriptor file not specified
usage:
adl ( -runtime <runtime-dir> )? ( -pubid <pubid> )? -nodebug? <app-desc> <root-dir>? ( -- ... )?
adl -help
newtricks:Adobe ted$

Download Flex Builder 3 Trial version from http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e-flex3email It seems you can get this from two places in the Adobe world. Here's another place. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flexbuilder3

I'm in Hour 2 of that Teach Yourself book. It doesn't tell me until Hour 4 that it recommends using Flex Builder. But I think when that time comes, I'll try the Flash Builder beta 2 because of Flex Builder's issue with Snow Leopard.

Examples

You can download a zip with examples for this book from http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780672330308

The book also lets you download examples for each hour separately from another site. The examples for Hour 2 are http://www.airination.info/airtraining/tyairin24/Helloworld.zip and http://www.airination.info/airtraining/tyairin24/HelloworldplusCert.zip .

You need the one with a certificate to package the example for distribution (certificates are discussed in Hour 3), but you can run it with adl without a certificate.

I don't think it's right to show the xml and html here. It's not my code. It's easily downloadable form the links I gave.

newtricks:AirApps ted$ adl hello_world-app.xml

Sun Dec 27 15:21:42 newtricks adl[1019] <Error>: The function `CGContextSetFontRenderingMode' is obsolete and will be removed in an upcoming update. Unfortunately, this application, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance. Please use `CGContextSetFontRenderingStyle' instead.

Now that message about the obsolete function. I get that if the <content></content> in hello_world-app.xml contains an html filename (I typed in the html file listed in the book). I don't see that message if the content contains the swf filename that came with the examples download.

newtricks:AirApps ted$ adl HelloWorld-app.xml