Ryan Phelan » AIR http://www.rphelan.com Exploring Flex, Design, and Visualization Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:56:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 AIR Install Badge Issues http://www.rphelan.com/2008/08/22/air-install-badge-issues/ http://www.rphelan.com/2008/08/22/air-install-badge-issues/#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:42:28 +0000 Ryan http://www.rphelan.com/?p=67 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.

]]> http://www.rphelan.com/2008/08/22/air-install-badge-issues/feed/ 3 A Perfect Application for AIR http://www.rphelan.com/2008/07/15/a-perfect-application-for-air/ http://www.rphelan.com/2008/07/15/a-perfect-application-for-air/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:01:15 +0000 Ryan http://www.rphelan.com/?p=44 At work, we stream an internet radio station called WOXY which plays a really great selection of independent rock. Since there's always new stuff coming on, I like to keep tabs on who I'm listening to when I hear something I like. They have a pop-out playlist on their website, but it's inconvenient (or actually impossible) to keep a browser window open when I'm doing Flex development/debugging/etc. So - I whipped together a mini AIR app that just sits in the taskbar and keeps an updated playlist. We're hosting the application on my company's blog, and if anybody is interested in the source I'd be happy to post that too. You can also check out this discussion on WOXY's Forum.  The feedback has been very positive so far, although some people are having a really hard time getting AIR installed.

WOXYplaylist

I was very impressed with this experience in the ease of putting together a taskbar based application. There aren't as many resources out there yet for AIR as there are for Flex, but I found most of the syntax fairly concise and intuitive. The major downside is AIR's memory footprint. This obscenely simple application takes up 20-25 Mb of RAM!  I've been reading similar complaints about other AIR applications too. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release...

Note: I built this app for my windows box and haven't tested it on a mac... because OSX doesn't really have a taskbar, it may have some issues.

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