Ashutosh Sharma

Tomas Laurinavičius has posted an amazing list of 22 very useful AIR applications at sixrevisions.com to help people in their design and image editing tasks.

Here's the article: http://sixrevisions.com/tools/22-awesome-adobe-air-applications-for-designers/. Go ahead and check it out (and remember to Digg/Tweet about it if you like it).

Since these are AIR applications, they should work on Win, Mac and Linux. (Do let us know if any of them do not work on a specific platform.)

Posted by Ashutosh Sharma at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Update: An updated tutorial, for AIR 1.5.1 SDK, has been posted at http://blogs.adobe.com/ashutosh/2009/03/flex_builder_linux_with_air_15.html

Some changes are required to get Flex Builder to use the new AIR Beta SDK for Linux. This is a step-by-step guide to get things up and running.

1. Ensure that you have Sun JRE >= 1.5 in your PATH (This can be verified with "java -version")

2. Install Eclipse (cpp or java) >= 3.3 to $HOME/eclipse
    - Download Eclipse 3.4 from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ (if you do not already have Eclipse >= 3.3)
    - cd ~
    - tar zxvf ./eclipse-cpp-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
    - This extracts eclipse under ~/eclipse

3. Install Flex Builder alpha 4 Eclipse plugin
    - Download the Flex Builder installer from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flexbuilder_linux.html and launch it
    - chmod +x ~/flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin
    - ~/flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin
    - Choose $HOME/eclipse as the "Existing Eclipse Folder":

    - Choose "Proceed with caution" if prompted

4. Install Flex SDK 3.1
    - Download Flex SDK 3.1 from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3
       - Choose Build 3.1.0.2710, Adobe Flex SDK dated Aug 15, 2008
    - Unzip it to a new folder ("3.1") under ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/sdks:
    - cd ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/sdks
    - mkdir 3.1
    - cd 3.1
    - unzip ~/flex_sdk_3.1.0.2710.zip

5. Install AIR Beta SDK under Flex SDK 3.1
    - Download Adobe AIR SDK from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air_linux.html to $HOME
    - Untar it to the folder created above
       - cd ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/sdks/3.1
       - tar jxvf ~/adobeair_linux_sdk_b1_091508.tbz2
    - Rename bin/adl to bin/adl_lin and bin/adt to bin/adt_lin (These are what Flex Builder expects)
       - cd bin
       - mv adl adl_lin
       - mv adt adt_lin

6. Set the newly installed SDK as default
    - Launch eclipse
       - ~/eclipse/eclipse
    - Window -> Preferences -> Flex -> Installed Flex SDKs
    - Click on Add
    - Select ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/sdks/3.1 as the "Flex SDK location". Click OK.

       - Choose "Flex 3.1" as the active SDK by selecting its checkbox. Click OK.

We're done!

To verify that the setup is correct:

1. Create a new AIR application
    - Create a new Flex Builder project (through File -> New)
    - Choose a project name, choose "Desktop application (runs in Adobe AIR)" as the application type. Click Finish.

2. Edit the new application's .mxml file
    - Change the line:
       <mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
       to
       <mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" title="{NativeApplication.nativeApplication.runtimeVersion} - {NativeApplication.nativeApplication.runtimePatchLevel}">

3. Run the application (Ctrl-F11)

4. The application's window will show up. Check the title of the window. It should be "1 - 6590" (new AIR SDK) and not "1.0 - 20080320" (old AIR SDK) if everything was set up correctly.

The application can be packaged as a .air file through File -> Export -> Flex Builder -> Release Build.

Posted by Ashutosh Sharma at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We've been actively working on features that weren't present in the alpha release of AIR for Linux - system tray icon, keyboard accelerators, PDF & SWF in HTML, encrypted local store, multi-monitor support and more.

To iron out as many issues as possible before coming out with a public beta release on Adobe Labs, we'd like to invite users to help test pre-release builds. If you're interested and comfortable working with pre-release software, please send an email to the AIR Linux program manager at ashish - dot - baweja - at - adobe - dot - com with answers to the following questions (picked from James Ward's post before the first Labs release):

1. Will you be able to submit bug reports on issues that you find back to our development team?
2. How many hours a week can you spend testing on Linux?
3. What is the primary distribution of Linux that you’re using? If you are using more than one distribution, please list.
4. Will you be developing applications on your Linux machine (as opposed to writing on Windows and testing the applications on Linux)?
5. What other operating system are you using, if any (Mac, Windows)? Can you compare the behavior of AIR for Linux with AIR for Windows and AIR for Mac OS?
6. Are you working on an AIR application today? If so, please describe.

Please include your name, email address and your company's name.

Posted by Ashutosh Sharma at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hi and welcome to my blog. I'm an engineer working on Adobe AIR for Linux operating environments.

Through this blog, in addition to providing updates about releases (and pre-releases), I'd like to discuss Linux-specific issues that pertain to Adobe AIR - troubleshooting tips, feedback about what features and distributions you think are most important, what issues you face, how certain features work (or not) under specific desktop and windowing environments. I may also solicit inputs from you to help us decide how we should proceed on specific issues.

If you haven't yet tried it, I encourage you to go get AIR and check out your favorite app on Linux. Details of what does and does not work in the alpha release on Adobe Labs are available in the release notes. (If you find problems, the best place to report them is the labs forum).

Posted by Ashutosh Sharma at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)