Adobe AIR Team Blog

The Flex team announced an update to the 3.5 SDK that addresses an issue with the Flex-based AIR auto-update UI packaged within the SDK (SDK-24766). It is strongly recommended that all Flex developers building AIR applications update to the 3.5a release. The SDK 3.5a can be found in the "Latest Milestone Release Build" table here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3. 

Today we are making available the second beta of Adobe AIR 2 on our Adobe Labs website. Since our first beta release of AIR 2 back in November, our team has been focused on improving the quality of AIR 2 as well as adding a number of new capabilities to the runtime.

Since we are very close to shipping AIR 2, we would like to request that all developers download the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime and SDK, read the release notes and developer FAQ for important changes and known issues, and test out their 1.0 and 2.0 applications. If you run into an issue, our team would like to hear from you. Please submit a bug using our feedback form. You can also post questions to the AIR 2 beta 2 forums if you would like to connect with other developers using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime and SDK.

Two new features that developers mab be particularly interested in are the following:

• Print Job Enhancements
  New properties and methods have been added to the PrintJob class to give you better control of the way content is printed from an AIR application, including the choice of printer, paper size, and number of copies. New properties also give you more information about the printer, such as printable area, whether the printer will print in color, and whether the print job is currently active. The new PrintJobOptions.printMethod property allows you specify whether to use bitmap or vector printing. The PrintJobOptions.pixelsPerInch property allows you to specify the resolution of print jobs. The new PrintUIOptions class allows you to control how much the end user can change the page range to be printed. See PrintJob, PrintJobOptions, and PrintUIOptions.
• TLS/SSL Sockets
  You can now connect to a server that requires TLSv1 or SSLv3 for socket communications. See SecureSocket.

If you are interested in learning more about the new printing capabilities in the AIR 2 beta 2, please be sure to watch Adobe platform evangelist Ryan Stewart's interview with Rick Rocheleau, the developer that led the development of these new features.

Important: Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 1 will not run using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 1 application to run on the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime, the namespace of the beta 1 application descriptor file must first be updated to "2.0beta2" and compiled against the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK. .

We have updated all of our AIR 2 beta sample applications to be compatible with the AIR 2 runtime.

Thank you for your continued help and support. In addition to our blog, please be sure to follow us on Twitter for AIR-related updates.

Rob Christensen
Product Manager, Adobe AIR

One application that recently caught my eye is Zoodles. Built using Adobe AIR, Zoodles is designed to provide a free, child-safe browser and promote learning through interactive games and videos. The browser works off a whitelist so children stay on sites that are pre-approved by the team at Zoodles. The application runs in full screen mode, and the user interface was designed to make it difficult for young children to switch out to other applications.

The browser comes loaded with age and skill-level appropriate games for children. The Zoodles browser interface adapts to a child based on age. As kids grow older, the interface grows with them. For example, younger children have a very simple navigation using a pictures model while older children can browse by category, topic and characters.

Zoodles provides a number of premium features for parents (each account comes with a free trial of these premium features):

• Promote Educational Subjects. Parents can promote specific subject areas such as reading and math so their children can engage with the topics that parents think they would benefit from the most
• Parental Controls. Parents can control what sites, branded characters, and types of content their child can engage with online.  Additionally parents can set time limits so their child only plays the amount of time in a day that they think is appropriate.
• Ad Blocker.  The Zoodles ad blocker removes ads from a child's interface which protects children from inappropriate ads while also making it easier for children to focus on the task at hand.
• Parental Monitoring. Parents are provided detailed reports on what their child has been doing online and what academic skills they have been developing

Congratulations to the teams at Zoodles for building an innovative, engaging application for parents and children!

Grant Skinner released a new, free tool called ASDocr built using the Adobe AIR 2 beta. The application is a graphical front-end to ASDoc, a command-line tool available in the Flex SDK. ASDoc allows you to create API language reference documentation as HTML pages from the classes in your Adobe Flex application.

From Grant's blog post announcing ASDocr:

Building on the new nativeProcess APIs in AIR 2.0, it provides a simple graphical interface to ASDoc. It walks you through all of the common params ASDoc supports, with help for each of them. You can save configurations for multiple projects, and clone configurations to act as a starting point for new projects.

If you are interested in checking out this application, you can find links to download the Mac and Windows builds on his blog (according to a comment on the blog, a Linux version is in the works). Be sure to grab the Adobe AIR 2 beta before installing the application as it will not run on AIR 1.5.3. If you have feedback on the application, Grant has requsted that feedback it be posted as a comment on his blog.

Greg Wilson tweeted that Tour de Flex, a desktop application for exploring Flex and Adobe AIR capabilities and resources, was recently updated to include additional Adobe AIR 2 samples for mass storage device detection, DNS, and network information.

If you are not familiar with Tour de Flex, it is a fantastic resource for discovering code samples. The application is free, powered by Adobe AIR and used by Flex developers all over the world (check out this amazing data visualization that displays global usage of the application).