Starting Development

I've begun researching how to get started with developing applications for AIR. It appears that almost all application development can be done with the Adobe CS3 suite, which I have already installed on my system. I am interested in pursuing Flex and how to incorporate it into AIR apps. An important download to get started with development in AIR is the Adobe AIR SDK.

I plan on following this tutorial on how to incorporate AJAX into Adobe AIR. The tutorial gives a good foundation on how to get started.

I have also been looking for Adobe AIR books on Amazon.com and plan on going to some local bookstores to see if I can pick up a good book to reference and give me some potential projects for my directed study.

Installing Air

Installing Air is relatively straight forward; all one must due is download the executable and run it; I did not have any dependency problems and the installation ran seamlessly. I then used the Adobe Air Showcase to download an application to test my installation. I had to sign up to become a member of the Adobe community (which was free) to download any of the showcase applications. I decided to try FinetuneDesktop as my first Air application, so I downloaded the .air file to my desktop and ran the application. The install ran successfully and placed an icon on my desktop.

The application is extremely light weight, accounting for no more than 8% of my processing power when idle, and taking only 66mb of memory usage. The primary framework of the application appears to be Adobe Flash, and Flex. I will continue to test additional applications utilizing different frameworks as backends.

First Post

Welcome to my MIST 5990 Directed Study Blog. From this blog, I will log over the course of the spring 2008 semester my work with rich internet applications, particularly with Adobe Air (Adobe Integrate Runtime). Adobe AIR is an cross operating system run time environment/framework built primarily to allow for Flash, Flex, Ajax, and HTML applications that can be deployed as desktop applications. It has great potential to allow for rich user-interaction, real-time data acquisition and manipulation, and lightweight powerful applications. Competing concepts include Microsoft Silverlight, JavaFX, and Mozilla's XUL. The official web site for Adobe Air can be found here. From the site, one can download Beta executable versions of the application as well as some showcase applications to demonstrate what Adobe Air can do for free.



I hope to post to this blog at least three days a week, keeping it up to date with my progress with Adobe Air. Check back soon for updates and summaries of what I am currently working on.