AIR Install Badge Issues

I love the concept of AIR badges. They make your application really simple to distribute, and Adobe has succeeded in making the installation of the AIR runtime along with your app completely seamless. But, what happens when the badges don't work? You can't install any AIR applications.

Check out the message I get every time I click on one of these badges:
Something went wrong trying to install this application. Please install the latest version of Adobe AIR from http://www.adobe.com/go/getair and

BTW - I get the same result in IE, Firefox and Safari and I've tried badges from dozens of different sites. (I'm running Vista on a brand new Dell laptop)

Believe me, I have the latest version of Adobe AIR. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the runtime a dozen times trying to figure this out. The applications install just fine if I can download and run the .air file. However, if I am not given that option, my only current workaround is to uninstall the AIR runtime. Then when I click the installer badge, it installs the runtime and the application together just fine.

If anybody knows of a solution, I'd love to hear it. My greater concern is that this could happen to anyone, and they might not be tech savvy or patient enough to figure out a solution. They just won't use your app. Or any AIR app.

The moral of the story is: please include a download link along with your AIR install badge so that people have an alternate method of installing your application.

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You’re currently reading “AIR Install Badge Issues,” an entry by Ryan Phelan

Published:: 08.22.08 / 9am

Category:: AIR

Oliver Goldman 08.27.08 / 12am

We (the AIR team) have seen these symptoms before on certain Vista machines with incorrect registry permission settings. This glitch affects all applications, not just AIR, but it is unfortunate that it happens to impact the badge install.

The best description of this issue that I’ve seen yet, along with instructions for fixing it, are at http://www.brianpeek.com/blog/archive/2007/11/29/weird-vista-registry-issue.aspx.

Harun Hasdal 09.08.08 / 1am

Hi Ryan,

The fix in the link above which Oliver Goldman posted works just fine. But here is a little trick to get the air file if you want.

View source of the html page that shows the install badge. In the source of the html document you’ll find a block of javascript
code. Looks like

var so = new SWFObject(“AIRInstallBadge.swf”, “Badge”, “215″, “180″, “9.0.115″, “#FFFFFF”);
so.useExpressInstall(‘expressinstall.swf’);
…..

And there is a variable passed to the SWFObject which contains the location of the .air file. Something like this:

so.addVariable(“appurl”, “http://host.com/path/someapp.air”);

So you can browse the url, download and run the installer yourself.
Hope this is helpful.

Ryan 09.08.08 / 3pm

Thanks for the tips guys. The suggested fix that Oliver linked to seems to have worked (and magically, a few other problems that I’ve been experiencing are fixed too). This looks like Vista’s fault to me, but it’s too bad because I can see this causing a lot of tech support nightmares for AIR developers…

AIR Install Badge Issues

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