Archive for the 'AIR' Category

When Adobe SwitchBoard was announced the other week I was intrigued. It sounded like something I had been wishing for for a while: a better way to create user interfaces that leveraged the capabilities of the Creative Suite applications, something that the current scripting environment doesn’t do very well. I installed it and read the documentation and my entusiasm quickly faded. It’s the same lame impossible-to-use BridgeTalk technology as before with the same contradictory and strangely inter-application-incompatible API:s, but packaged differently. It’s true that you can create great user interfaces, but the scripting still sucks — and it turns out that it’s a resource hog.

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The asynchronous API:s in Flash, Flex and AIR don’t all work the same in regards to garbage collection. I discovered this the other day when testing out file uploading in Flash. I made the mistake of not keeping a reference to the object that was going to dispatch events when the user had selected a file. It took me half an hour to figure out what was happening, and once I did I cursed myself for not seeing it straight away. However, after having thought about it I think that the the Flash, Flex and AIR API:s are inconsistent and a bit unintuitve on this point.

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The Adobe AIR beta 1 runtime installer leaves a lot to be desired. Adobe continues the blantant disregard for standard folders and proceedures on the Mac that Macromedia had, and this leads to problems. I had to do quite a lot of tinkering to be able to install it at all.

For me, the installer just failed with “Installation Error: 2038″. No more information. I was stumped.

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