Auto update API for AIR Native Installer Apps

Posted by on Aug 25, 2010 in AIR | 2 comments

If you’ve played around with native installers for AIR 2, you probably already found out that you cannot use the update framework. My fellow evangelist Piotr just released a solution for that.

Piotr’s NativeApplicationUpdater library works in exactly the same way as the update framework you use for AIR applications. When your app starts it loads an XML file that has all the update information. If an update is available you will be prompted to download and install it. Piotr actually uses another AIR 2 feature to launch the downloaded native installer. By opening the package with openWithDefaultApplication() the installer launches and installs the update.

I’ll definitely add this to the next release of my Package Assistant application (an update is coming soon!).

Check out the video where Piotr explains how it works and download the library from Google Code.

If you haven’t played with native installers for AIR 2 and want to learn more, then check out my video tutorial.

2 Comments

  1. Mingoes
    August 27, 2010

    Lifesaver! Thanks!!

  2. Jonathan Kaye
    September 3, 2010

    I tried using the application for my Flex 3.5 project (with AIR 2.0). I make it through all the steps and it tells me it was created successfully, however, it doesn’t write the file to where it said it was supposed to. I am running on Windows Vista. Any thoughts as to what might be going wrong?