Deploying AIR applications

Posted by on Jun 16, 2008 in How-to, onAIR Tour | 1 comment

My presentation at the On AIR tour through Europe was about signing, deploying and updating your AIR applications. If you didn’t make it to the tour or just want to read up on these topics, I wrote three separate posts about them on the train somewhere between Prague and Munich.

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

Posted by on Jun 16, 2008 in How-to, onAIR Tour | Comments Off

My presentation at the On AIR tour through Europe was about signing, deploying and updating your AIR applications. If you didn’t make it to the tour or just want to read up on these topics, I wrote three separate posts about them on the train somewhere between Prague and Munich.

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.