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.
On AIR tour part 2: 2000km of 3500 done
Some 2000 kilometers (about 1300 miles), about 31 hours on 5 different trains and about 10 battery charges later, we arrived in Prague today. Well… Actually, I’m writing this on the train from Warsaw to Prague so we’re not actually there yet and we still have about 5 hours left on this train but I can’t actually post this until we do arrive in Prague. But anyway, I thought this would be a great time to look back at last week.
onAIR tour part 2 almost sold out / 26 days to go
At this moment there are only 37525 minutes left for you to register for the second leg of the onAIR tour. That’s 26 days before we start travelling from northern to southern Europe. In case you forgot, we are doing this onAIR tour by train and there are some pretty challenging routes we have to take this time. We start in Stockholm on June 2nd and end in Milan on June 13th. I don’t know if my evangelist buddies have already seen this but our first train ride, from Stockholm to Berlin, is going to be 15 hours. Our train-ride from Madrid to Paris was a good rehearsal but this one is even longer. I’m already stacking up on extra batteries etc and I’m gonna make sure my 3G card works. Maybe we should carry a power generator on the train so we don’t run out of juice :-)
I remember that in one of his videos, Lee Brimelow says that “Europe isn’t that big”. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna change that statement by the end of this tour.
Again looking forward to this tour… We are visiting some really beautiful cities, some of which I’ve never been to myself. We’re doing Stockholm, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Munich and Milan. If you weren’t aware of this yet, we are also giving away a bunch of goodies and for the second part of the tour we’re getting everyone a copy of the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers book and a copy of the RIA ActionScript 3 printed reference guide. They weren’t ready in time to take on the first leg but don’t worry if you came to the first part of the tour, you’ll receive an email soon with details on how you can get them as well. In the meantime, you can download these books.
Oh… Did I already mention the tour is almost sold out? So if you haven’t registered yet (it’s free by the way), now is the time to do so! Register at onair.adobe.com. Hope to see you in Stockholm, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Munich or Milan!
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