Does anyone else find it odd that there’s no Adobe backed central repository for distributing AIR applications? I know that the Central runtime never really went anywhere (apparently due to the technical limitations of the users computer at the time).
So is the world ready for a centralised, built for developers, run for users AIR (dare I say it) App store?
Perhaps it’s time to feed Apple a bit of it’s own medicine, pretending to be innovative in an area that quite clearly has already been done - just not marketed properly.
This time around however, I think Adobe (and it’s throng of Flash developers) can cling to the coattails of Apple’s App Store - but with the promise of being able to use the application across all devices that have the Flash Player installed.
I’m hoping that the latest Flash Player version will allow this to become a reality.
If anyone’s got information about businesses that have already tried to monetise this please add your comments at the bottom.
UPDATE: I’ve been reliably informed by Tink in the comments that there is an Adobe AIR Marketplace. Possibly the fact that I don’t know about it means that there’s still a bit of marketing work to be done somewhere.
This is my first foray into using Flex 4, and it takes off from where I was at with my Converter application (as mentioned here, here and here) back in September of 2006 (shizzer time flies!).
I’ve changed the currency conversion to use Google’s Finance site, which means far more accurate conversions are occurring now.
I’d like to make it so you can select multiple currencies and convert to them all at one time. Also with the ability to remember the settings that you’ve used.
If anyone else has got any ideas about features they’d like to see just leave me a comment.
You can view the web version of the converter here www.wrench.com.au/converter
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
Or you can install the Air app by clicking on the install badge if you’d prefer to have it on your desktop.
I’m using Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 to create this app. I’ve had to setup 2 projects to export both the web and Air version of the converter. If anyone’s got any tips on doing this from a single project then that would be appreciated. I suppose if it was a more complex piece of code, then there’d be some benefit in splitting the codebase, as it is this just adds a hurdle in the way of a smooth development process.
I’ve also given up on trying to fix the security issues I was having with accessing an external link on a 3rd party server for the currency conversions (as detailed back in the first three posts I made on the converter). I’ve got a php proxy page on my server instead which calls the google site and then returns the results to the swf. This only occurs for the web version though, the Air one connects directly to Google so is about 250ms quicker on each currency conversion.
I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes mucking around with a cool AIR app called TiltShift. It basically lets you create images using a technique called Tilt Shift Photography. The app does a rather nifty job I must say, here’s what I knocked up in around 15 minutes from the back catalogue of images on my computer.
I reckon image 4 is the best one, though I’ll continue to plough through the image banks at this end looking for suitable candidates to miniaturise. Anything where the subject matter is below the camera seems to work well. Obviously the Tower of London doesn’t fit into this category, so I’ll have to take a happy snap from the Eye and have another crack at that ;-)
For those wanting to do it the old school way, check out this Photoshop tutorial that shows how.
I’ve spent a good deal of the last couple days fiddling around with two list applications (they’re both Air apps). The first one, MiniTask takes (as the name suggests) a minimalist approach to task lists. The second one, Simple Tasks V2 is much more complex and has a few of the features that I think would be useful in MiniTask. However Simple Tasks doesn’t appear to be in development anymore, and also unfortunately quite buggy (tasks don’t save sometimes, which kinda defeats the purpose).
The irony of all this is that instead of getting the things done on my list (which is currently just a basic text formatted list in an Outlook task item) I’ve been searching for the perfect way to store my to-do’s. Talk about procrastinating!!
So how do you go about actually getting things on your list done? Is it the way you break the lists down, or organise them, or only have three things in there at once, or plan your day to tackle items x, y and z…?
I’ve even got Getting Things Done on my bookshelf at the moment, but wouldn’t you know it I’ve been procrastinating about reading that too!!!
There’s actually an items on one of my lists (yes I’ve got more than one) to create a time management app. And you guessed it, that hasn’t been crossed off the list yet either.
Sheish!
Sorry about the terrible play on words there (I’ve been taking too many literary cues from the Adelaide Advertiser ;-) but I am pretty excited about travelling to the UK next week and attending the London onAIR conference. Obviously it’s a long way to travel from Adelaide, Australia to the UK for a free conference - so I better get my money’s worth! hehe, no seriously I’m moving over there to play some cricket and try and spruce up my Flash portfolio (if there’s any Flash developer work going around Cambridge, I’d love to hear about it)
So if you’re an Aussie travelling across or already in London planning on attending the conference or for that matter anyone interested in making another acquaintance just leave me a comment. I shouldn’t be hard to miss… I’ll be the bloke with his life’s possessions on his back having come straight from Heathrow to attend the London Tour, and probably a Red Bull in each hand trying to shake off the 16,000 odd kilometres of drowsiness. So apologies in advance if I nod off during one of the presentations having found a nice comfy spot on your shoulder ;-)
I’m a flash developer.
Though I’ve always taken the claims that 98% of internet enabled desktops have the Flash plug-in. I’ve seen this marketing babble get run a few times now in regards to Apollo vs. Silverlight and in general when talking about the ubiquity of the Flash family of products (Flash, Flash Lite, Flex and now Apollo).
Regarding Apollo, how does “98%” of the internet having Flash installed make any difference to the (at this point in time) 0% of the general public that have the Apollo runtime installed… I just don’t see the connection.
What is interesting me about Apollo is not so much the ability to create something for the web (ie. Flex) and be able to deploy it to the desktop (at least on Mac and Windows XP and Vista) but how Adobe intend on getting the install base of Apollo up to make it a viable solution to recommend to customers and clients. Time will tell what strategy they have, but considering Vista doesn’t come with Flash (or the Apollo runtime for that matter) coupled with the distinct possibility of Microsoft making Silverlight (et al) some form of necessary Windows update, I think Adobe has it’s work cut out for it.
For the record, I’m rooting for Adobe.
I’ve been quite interested to see how Apollo handles the rendering of HTML, which got me thinking about what user-agent string it would actually present to a site that it is browsing. So, here ’tis:
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3 Apollo/1.0.Alpha1
I haven’t seen this mentioned much before, but when visiting sites that detect for Flash using the swfobject code, the alternative content ends up being displayed in Apollo. I’m assuming this is because the swfobject can’t detect whether the flash plugin is installed within the Apollo browser. Has anyone else noticed this, or have any pointers as to how to circumvent this?
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