I'm going to use adobe air to create an app. Do users have to install air first ? Also can it be bundled within the app itself as just one easy install?
You can package app as Captivate Runtime, hence no need to install Air at all.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f709e16db131e43659b9-8000.html
http://www.adobe.com/de/products/air/faq.html#Licensing:
"No, the Adobe AIR free distribution agreement does not allow you to distribute AIR from your website. You must direct visitors to the download center on Adobe.com. To easily link to Adobe.com, we provide Adobe AIR buttons that you can display on your site. If you would prefer not to direct users to Adobe.com, AIR provides a feature called Seamless Install that allows AIR to be installed as part of the application installation process."
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I want to know how to find out which version of Flex is installed with Flash CS6 or do I have to install the SDK separately?
I know Adobe AIR 3.2 is installed on in the Flash CS6 program folder as I found the Adobe AIR 3.2 folder in the Flash CS6 program folder.
In Flash CS Preferences, if I click on the Actionscript 3 settings button it shows the Flex SDK path as:
$(AppConfig)/ActionScript 3.0/flex_sdk/4.0.0/
Does this mean that Flex 4 is installed on the computer? I ask this because I couldn't find a folder for Flex 4 SDK.
Also, if AIR 3.2 is installed, do I need Flex?
Can I achieve the same results with AIR 3.2 as I can with Flex?
I want to develop Flash applications that will allow the user to save and load data locally as a text file, create a line chart of that data and then save a screenshot of that chart from within Flash without using any other tool such as the Snipping Tool in Windows.
I did a lot of research on these subjects on different forums, including Stack Overflow, but just ended up more confused than I already was.
Flash is now Animate. It's like photoshop. Photoshop creates images in many forms. Flash/Animate is software that makes .swf, html5 canvas, AIR, Android apps, iOS apps, and more.
Flex is a Flash framework.
The reason you have to mess with the SDK is because you're using an old non-working version of Flash. If you use a working version of Animate, you don't have to install SDKs manually.
AIR is what you want to use. .swf was Flash applications for browsers/web pages. AIR is Flash applications for OSs. AIR creates .exe for desktop and native apps for phones.
With AIR you can make a word processor and image processor.
Do users gain any performance benefits when a they update their AIR or Flash Player installs?
Let's say a new version of AIR is twice as fast at array.indexOf(). Does my AIR app or Flash Player app get that performance benefit when a user updates?
FYI My app is published using AIR 3.6 and SWF is published with swf-version 19. When I run my AIR app and there is an AIR update it restarts after I install the latest version of AIR so I'm guessing I'm using the newest version of AIR although my app is using AIR 3.6 API.
If there is optimization in newest version of Air or Flash player (I mean in virtual machine), your application or swf will get benefits of new versions. But if Adobe team changed the way SDK builds code (translates it to bytecode), then you need to rebuild your app to get performance update.
So my recommendation is to rebuild application as soon as you get new SDK and make sure that everything works as designed.
I'm looking at this Howto:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=distributing_apps_3.html#1036176
But I cannot get it to work with a Native installer application. These are .EXE/.DMG AIR apps that are downloaded and installed, NOT .air apps installed by badge.swf. I need to be able to do a browser invocation with a few additional flashvars set.
I already tried to modify the badge.swf file by got many compile errors in FlashBuilder 4.5
Is there an online example of how to do this?
The AIR installer badge is intended to be used in the situation where the user has Flash installed, but may not have AIR installed. When the user clicks on the badge to install the AIR application, the AIR runtime is first downloaded and installed if necessary, and then the application is installed.
There is no reason to use the badge with a packaged native installer because the installer will download and install the AIR runtime if necessary before installing the application.
You can create a SWF which looks like a badge and downloads the native installer using a FileReference. There is however no way to execute the installer automatically after it has downloaded as doing so would present serious security risks.
The best course of action is to present clear instructions to the user on how to download and install the application using the native installer.
Which would be better (performance and development time) for me if I'm creating an desktop application using HTML/CSS/JS?
Is AIR more efficient at Flex and ActionScript than HTML/JS?
I've played with Titanium for a bit, but packaged app is more than 30MB, which is more than the AIR runtime + app. Is it alway that big or am I missing something?
Titanium ships with the entire runtime, adobe air does not. A person doesn't need "Titanium Desktop" installed to run your application.
I prefer titanium over adobe air, even though adobe air may be mature software for the following reasons:
It seems a restrictive, sandboxes and such.
It does not have bleeding edge web technologies, it seems as though adobe air hasn't updated their webkit even since the last version.
It does not require a user to install another application to get an application.
actually it depends on how you bundle your titanium app as well (network install?)
What exactly is Adobe Air? I've seen a lot of people talking about it and I've even seen applications for it but I'm still not entirely sure what makes it unique or how it is different from other languages. Can someone please give me the concise version from a programmer's point of view?
Edit:
I wasn't familiar with Flex so I found this nice explanation: http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/01/what-is-flex.php
In a nutshell.
Start with the assumption that you know what Flex and Actionscript are. Then take the fact that they both run exclusively in your browser and to all intents and purposes are for building web apps.
Now assume you want to develop the same app, with the same language and user interface resources, but run it as a desktop app on a workstion (PC, Mac, or Linux interchangeably).
AIR is what you add (as a link library) to Flex and Actionscript to accomplish that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime
Write cross-platform desktop apps in Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax.
Adobe Air is a framework which allows to build desktop applications and it is based on HTML/JS and Flash.
Adobe Air its Flash Runtime that can run Flash inside it and provide access to your operation system.
Adobe Air can be used for gaming and software as usual Flash. Its stand alone flash player with extended and reach functionality. For example you can develop flash app that will interact with filesystem or hardware.
Also its support native extensions so you can extend Air using native C/Java libraries.
air can be produced as exe for windows, app for mac, ipa for ios, apk for android, linux with limitations and blackberry.
Adobe Air is cross platform language/tool for mobile, window and OSX application.