Demand for RIA-jobs on the rise
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time but for some reason never got around to it.
I remember someone asked me about Flex jobs in Europe when I showed this graph at the Flex pre-release tour last February. This graphs shows the increase in demand for Flex coders but is based on data from the US. I remember responding to the question saying that everywhere I go, people ask if I don’t know anyone that knows Flex or ActionScript. So I did a quick check with a few companies in Belgium and the demand is definitely there.
Boulevart is currently looking for Flash developers and Flex/AIR developers. LBi is looking for Flash/AS3 developers. iDa/MediaFoundry is looking for RIA developers. These Days is looking for Flashers/Flexers.
And I’m pretty sure there are more jobs out there if you look for them. And that seems to be the big problem right now. You’ll have to do a little bit of extra effort to actually find these jobs. You usually won’t find them in the newspapers…
Peter Elst is trying to make that a lot easier. He just launched RIAjobs.org, a job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight. As it only launched a few days ago, there aren’t that many jobs yet but I’m sure that will change soon. Usergroup meetings and conferences are also a great way of meeting companies who are hiring and obviously keeping an eye on your favorite company’s website is also a good way of finding out about job opportunities.
AIR 1.1 adds localization and performance improvements
AIR 1.1 is out the door and even though this is a dot release, that doesn’t mean there’s not much new to tell. AIR 1.1 includes the following new capabilities:
- Installation and other runtime dialog boxes have been translated into:
- Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish
- Support for building internationalized applications, including keyboard input for double-byte languages
- Support for localizing the name and description attributes in the application descriptor file
- Support for localizing error messages, such as SQLError.detailID and SQLError.detailArguments, in the SQLite database
- Addition of Capabilities.languages property to obtain an array of preferred UI languages as set by the operating system
- HTML button labels and default menus, such as context menus and the Mac menu bar,
have been localized to all supported languages - Support for certificate migration from a self-signed application to one that chains to a
certificate of authority (CA) - Support for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and support for 64-bit editions of Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise.
- Addition of File.spaceAvailable : API to obtain the amount of disk space available on a disk
- Addition of NativeWindow.supportsTransparency property to determine whether a window can be drawn as transparent by the current operating system
- Bug fixes and memory improvements
To start working with these new capabilities and performance improvements, there are updates available for your favorite development environment.
For Flex Builder, see this Flex Builder Technote.
For Dreamweaver, download the updated version of the Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver.
For Flash, follow the instructions in this Flash Technote.
Additionally, Aptana Studio (for AJAX development) is also already updated to support AIR 1.1
Download the updated runtime from http://get.adobe.com/air/. Get more information here (PDF).
Updating AIR applications
This is probably the most important step to take when you are building your application and it should probably be the first thing you do. Let’s say someone found a bug in your application and you fixed it in a newer version. How are you going to tell users about that bug-fix if you don’t have an update mechanism in place? AIR has everything on board to make updating applications a breeze, both for you and the user of your application.
Deploying AIR applications
You created your AIR file… so now what? The easiest thing to do is to upload the file to your server and put a link to it on your website. But this is not very user-friendly for whoever is going to download and install your application. In some cases, when your server isn’t configured to handle AIR files, it may even fail altogether. That’s why we created the concept of install badges. Install badges are basically a small Flash application that handles download and install in such a way that it becomes very easy for the end user to install your application.
Signing AIR applications
First of all, why is signing an application important? Easy. When your application is unsigned or signed with a self-signed certificate, the user will get two red icons on the install screen. The first one is related to your code signing certificate. It’s telling you that the “publisher is unknown” which is very normal since we have no idea who actually signed this application.
When you do get a code signing certificate and sign the application with it, the icon will turn green or in some cases yellow. The yellow icon will appear when you are using the file I/O API.
Feel free to follow me on: 
