Yeah… I know… You probably already know about this and yes… I am a bit late to the party but I promise to return to my normal blogging schedule soon. The last couple of weeks I’ve been mostly occupied with looking for a place to live and when I found it furnishing it and getting everything hooked up and getting all the paperwork done took just about all my time. But back to the topic of this blog post.

Flash Builder 4.6 and Flex SDK 4.6 are available now. The one thing you may have missed is that this is a FREE UPDATE for Flash Builder 4.5 owners! Quick note: The update is not delivered by the update manager so you must download the trial of Flash Builder 4.6 and then you can use your Flash Builder 4.5 serial number to activate. You also must uninstall your previous version of Flash Builder 4.5 or 4.5.1 before installing 4.6.

The biggest new features in the SDK are the new mobile components. For Flash Builder I’d say that the ability of adding native extensions to your AIR apps as well as the ability to compile your apps with captive runtime support are the biggest additions to Flash Builder 4.6. Michael Chaize has a great post describing the new Flex 4.6 components and how to use them. He also talks about the new features in Flash Builder 4.6.

Michael also just released The Game Of Flex. The Game Of Flex is a quiz with 16 questions, and it’s a real game, which means that if you correctly answer all the questions you get a chance to win a copy of Flash Builder 4.6!!!

You should also check out Holly Schinsky’s post on how to use the new MapQuest API in your Flex 4.6 applications. It’s pretty amazing to see how advanced MapQuest has become and how easy it is to implement this in your Flex or Flash applications.

Flash on!

When I think about the new features in AIR 2.7 I can’t help but think about this Daft Punk song… Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. That’s exactly what this release is all about… Well… You know what I mean ;-)

On mobile my favorite new feature is the improved rendering on iOS. With this release AIR apps for iOS render up to 4x faster in CPU mode. This change will improve the performance of many AIR for iOS apps, including those built with the Flex framework.

But don’t believe our words for it… Try it out yourself! There are already some really cool AIR apps in the appstore today. Try the Rossignol app for instance.

Or try one of Terry Paton’s games like Meteor Storm or Mazeball!

Another one of my favorite new features is probably the most requested feature for AIR for Android. You can now install or move the AIR runtime onto the SD cards within your Android devices!

An update for Flash Builder will be released soon but you can already grab the AIR SDK today and start building your apps!

I just wanted to give you a quick update on my Package Assistant Pro application. I’m really happy to see how many people have downloaded the application and the excitement from those who have sent me feedback.

Let me first start with the bad news. The Windows version seems to be broken. Specifically, the build process with the latest AIR for Android SDK fails. I am currently investigating that issue and hope to have a fix very soon.

Now the good news. I got a lot of good feature requests and will try to add as many of them as possible in the next release. I want to get this out the door as soon as possible (probably before the end of the month). Here are some of the features I plan on adding:

• Package for iOS ;-) I actually already have this code done and it’s just a matter of adding it to the main application
• Ability to create APKs for the emulator
• Ability to automatically install and launch the app on a connected Android device
• Ability to validate the entire application descriptor file
• Auto update mechanism

If you have any other feature requests then now would be a good time to let me know. ;-) Just leave a comment or send me an email. Thank you for your patience.

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.

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).