These platforms are in beta and our support is needed to use them in the real world and report any problems we may find.

Today thou I got a surprise: agendaBT. An AIR application that is a very nice agenda application. You can take notes per days using different colors, highlight what you have written or just draw. And while this is not particularly exciting by itself, the design is impressive, I really like it. You can see for yourself:

agendaBT

Polaris - Adobe AIR desktop reporing for Google Analytics

It is simple to use and free to manage one website profile. It has nice charts and visual transitions. I would love to have this tool for WordPress stats also

Because it is written in AIR and because is open source and AIR 1.5 just got out with new interesting features, I thought, why not “bend” a little Spaz, just for fun.

I say just for fun because it was not something done after a careful consideration of the usefulness of adding this effect in Spaz.

I have used as a starting point the BlaskBookSafe application described in my previous post. The changes made in Spaz were as follows:

1. I have updated spaz/assets/air/AIRAliases.js with the last one provided by Adobe AIR SDK 1.5
2. I have copied the bender folder from BlackBookSafe into spaz
3. I have copied BenderEffect.js and Tween.js from BBS to spaz/assets/lib folder
4. I have added some small pieces of code in spaz/index.html and spaz/assets/assets/spaz.prefs.js

The added code in index.html was of course importing those two scripts added in the lib folder. We need them in order to create the effect and also to “tween” it, to transform the bend into an animation.

The code from spaz.prefs.js is a little more complicated and it creates the bend effect and starts the tween:

   1:  'window-alpha': {

   2:      setUI: function(value) {

   3:          $('#window-alpha').val(parseInt(value));

   4:      },

   5:      onChange: function(value) {

   6:          //alert(percentage+"%");

   7:          percentage = parseInt(value);

   8:          if (isNaN(percentage)) {

   9:              percentage = 100;

  10:          }

  11:          if (percentage < 25) {

  12:              percentage = 25;

  13:          }

  14:          var val = parseInt(percentage) / 100;

  15:          if (isNaN(val)) {

  16:              val = 1;

  17:          } else if (val >= 1) {

  18:              val = 1;

  19:          } else if (val <= 0) {

  20:              val = 1;

  21:          }

  22:   

  23:          /*  the bending code */

  24:          BlenderEffect.get('app:/bender/page.pbj', function(shader){

  25:              var tween = BlenderEffect.createShaderTransition(window.htmlLoader, 

  26:                  shader , 1200, Tween.effects.elasticEase);

  27:              tween.hideOnFinish = false; 

  28:              tween.start(true);

  29:          });

  30:   

  31:          window.htmlLoader.alpha = val;

  32:      },

  33:      check: function() {

  34:  .....

  35:  }

The addition was inside the onChange method for the window-alpha setting.

The reason I choose this method was to have a visual indication for changing the alpha setting from preferences. With all this in place, when changing the alpha setting for Spaz a nice effect will warp a little bit the window. I will let you to discover this as an image will not do it.

In the mean time I will send an email to Funkatron, maybe they will be interested in incorporating this in a more useful way .

What I want to talk about is a new sample made specially to show the new capabilities of this release, BlackBookSafe. It is an HTML/JavaScript application using jQuery framework and leveraging the encrypted local database, 3d transformations and Pixel Bender effects. Indeed, with the new AIR you can “bend pixels” .

BlackBookSafe screen

BlackBookSafe bended screen

The effect was created using the Adobe Pixel Bender available in Flash Player. And yes, I said that BlackBookSafe was created using HTML and JavaScript. You want to find out how was it done? Mihai Corlan, an Adobe Platform Evangelist wrote an article detailing exactly how this application was created in BlackBookSafe: Anatomy of an AIR 1.5 application.

One of the most powerful features of a web application is instant update. Your client doesn’t need to do anything when you fix some bugs in your web application. The next time he accesses the site the user will have the latest version of your application.

Update a desktop application

Creating an AIR application means creating a desktop one. It comes with all the benefits of this type of application but also with some of the drawbacks. And one of them is the challenge of updating the application to the most recent version.

Of course this is not a new subject and a lot of applications have their own method of doing updates and upgrades. Adobe AIR has now the Update Framework, a Flex library that helps you update any AIR application non intrusively, similar to any web application.

Adobe AIR Update Framework

Now, I talked at the beginning about updating a JavaScript AIR application and just above I mentioned that the update framework is a Flex component. That is true and it is very easy to use this component even without any Flex knowledge. To demonstrate this technology I will use the microlink application that I wrote recently.

First, copy the applicationupdater_ui.swf found in the update framework into your project. (You can download the update framework from here). Because I am using Flex Builder 3 to develop this application the updater component will be placed under the src folder inside my project.

Next, create the update descriptor file. This is a small XML file that contains all the information needed by the updater. This includes the version number, the application location on your server and a description where details about the improvements in the new version can be written.

<?xml version=“1.0″ encoding=“utf-8″?>
<update xmlns=“http://ns.adobe.com/air/framework/update/description/1.0″>
    <version>0.3</version>
    <url>http://localhost:8080/releases/MyAirApp.air</url>
    <description><![CDATA[
Version 0.3 of this application includes the updateing framework.
  ]]></description>
</update>

I will name this file update.xml and this will go on the web server. I placed it in the same location as my AIR application so it is reachable from http://localhost:8080/releases/update.xml.

We will want to check for updates each time the application is started. Of course we can also choose to create a menu item or a button to let the user explicitly request a check for updates. In either case, we have to write some JavaScript code to wire things together. JavaScript code in AIR applications can use classes defined in SWF files.

In the HTML file that will use the update framework (in our case index.html) we have to include a script tag that loads the framework.

<script src="ApplicationUpdater_UI.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>

After we include the update framework in our application we have to use it. The instantiation and configuration of this is described inside the comments in the next piece of code, from index.html

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
        <title>My first AIR application</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="microlink.css" type="text/css" />
        <script type="text/javascript" src="lib/AIRIntrospector.js"></script>
        <script src="applicationupdater_UI.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>

        <script src="lib/jquery-1.2.6.js"></script>
        <script src="microlink.js"></script>
        <script>
        // instantiate an updater object
           var appUpdater = new runtime.air.update.ApplicationUpdaterUI();

        function load() {
            // ApplicationUpdaterUI can be configured via a configuration file 
            // delivered with the application or via JavaScript in the application.
            appUpdater.configurationFile =
                new runtime.flash.filesystem.File("app:/config/updateConfig.xml");

            // setting the event handler for INITIALIZED
            appUpdater.addEventListener(runtime.air.update.events.UpdateEvent.INITIALIZED,
                onUpdate);

            // It initializes the update framework, silently installing synchronously 
            // any pending updates. It is required to call this method during application
            // startup because it may restart the application when it is called.
            appUpdater.initialize();
        }

        function onUpdate(event) {
            //starts the update process
            appUpdater.checkNow();
        }

        </script>

    </head>
    <body onload="load()">

    <h1>this is my first AIR app.</h1>

    <a id="microlink_a" href="http://www.stratulat.com/blog/feed" class="button"
        onClick="onClickMicroLink(this); return false;">the microlink</a>

    </body>
</html>

The updateConfig.xml file can set up a lot of parameters for the application updater, most of them related to the behavior of the UI. Only one, however required for the updater to perform well and that is the URL to the update.xml on the server.

I configured updateConfig.xml so that at startup the application first asks if the user wants to check for updates. If so, because I have set up my application version as being 0.2 and inside the update.xml as 0.3, the application displays the update available UI, which shows all the information I’ve set up in the update.xml file on the server.

In this short demo on how to use the Update Framework I showed all the required steps in order to use it. There is one thing however that was not covered and that is error handling.

I have exported my project from Flex Builder 3 and you can download it from here: MyAirApp.zip.

Adobe AIR Update Framework – Flex

I was inspired in this article by the one written by Mihai Corlan on his blog: How to easily and seamlessly update an AIR application. The article discusses exactly the same topic but from the Flex perspective.

A microlink is a link that opens up content below it. It is a way to improve the ordinary link using Ajax.

In the original article I have used prototype.js and scriptaculous to implement this. Now I am using jquery because it is AIR-ready. That means it works off the shelf in AIR.

If we look into the Flex Navigator view we can see some new resources that are used in order to make the application. Let’s explain each of them one by one.

microlink.css is the stylesheet and is actually optional so I will not talk about this too much. I have used it in order to make the link more visible.

   1:  .button {

   2:     color: #003399;

   3:   }

   4:   

   5:  .button:hover {

   6:     text-decoration: none;

   7:       color: #66ffcc;

   8:       background-color: #003399;

   9:   }

  10:   

  11:  .button:active {

  12:     color: #ffffff;

  13:     background-color: #0099cc;

  14:   }

  15:   

  16:  .microdiv {

  17:      background-color: #ccccff;

  18:      border: 1px solid #9999cc;

  19:  }

microlink.js is the actual JavaScript piece of code that makes a regular link into a microlink. It contains just one function to handle the click event.

   1:  /**

   2:   * Function called when the microlink is called to update 

   3:   * the div with remote content.

   4:   * 

   5:   * @param {element} e the element that fired the event.

   6:   */

   7:  function onClickMicroLink(e)  {

   8:      var elID = e.id;

   9:      var divID = elID.substr(0, elID.length-2); // remove trailing '_a'

  10:      

  11:      $('#'+elID).after(' <div id="'+ divID +'" class="microdiv" ' +

  12:              'style="display:none"></div>');

  13:              

  14:      // Performs an AJAX request and updates a container's contents 

  15:      // based on the response text.

  16:      // @see http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax

  17:      $.ajax({

  18:          url: e.href,

  19:          dataType: 'text',

  20:          cache: false,

  21:          success: function(text){

  22:              $('#'+divID).append(text);

  23:              $('#'+divID).fadeIn("slow");

  24:          }

  25:      });

  26:  } 

Inside the index.html I have added just one more line (aside from including the jquery library):

   1:  <a id="microlink_a" 

   2:       href="http://www.stratulat.com/blog/feed" 

   3:       class="button" 

   4:       onClick="onClickMicroLink(this); return false;">the microlink</a>

Now running the application will show a link. When you click this link an Ajax call will be made to the feeds page of this site. The response is treated as text and it will be injected as the contend of the div created on line 11. Of course, the real use of this is to replace the href of this link with something that is indeed valuable for your application.

This small example covers more than just creating a microlink. It also shows how to make an Ajax call from an AIR application and how to use the response which is done in just the same way as in a browser.

Adobe AIR 1.1 is out. you can download it from http://get.adobe.com/air/

With this release, the Adobe AIR runtime has gone global:

• The runtime has been translated into ten additional languages: Japanese, French, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
• The Adobe AIR APIs and file formats have been updated to enable AIR-based applications to be localized
• International keyboard input is fully supported
• Adobe AIR 1.1 is GB18030 certified

Additionally, a new certificate migration feature is available which allows developers to migrate their applications between different digital signing certificates.

The Update Framework went live on Labs: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Adobe_AIR_Update_Framework

• This framework provides update functionality in AIR apps by using a remote descriptor (an XML file describing the update that sits on your remote server)
• This framework is designed to work with both Flex and Ajax based AIR apps
• It comes in two flavors
  • As a “headless” library – this just does all the work (checking remote url, downloading update, etc) and dispatches events so developers can hook their own UI
  • As a “UI” library – this basically does the same thing as the headless lib, but it also includes default dialogs that can be used out of the box in your app. This is the easiest way to use the framework and have all the update functionality out of the box.
• The easiest way to start with it is by checking the “simple_ui” sample from the samples package (for both Flex or HTML/JS)