Can I develop an Adobe AIR application without Flash Builder? - air

Can i develop an Adobe AIR application without Flash Builder?
I want to run it from command line. If you have any example please share with me.

You can use Flash Develop as an alternative to Flash Builder, which is opensource / free.

Flash Develop is the best open source tool .

Yes. You need the Flex SDK which is available free of charge here. This means you need to hook it up with an IDE of your choice. The flip side is you won't have any debugger to help you along.
Note, Adobe offers free licenses of FlashBuilder for students and unemployed professionals too! See this.

Related

Adobe AIR sample applications?

I just started to learning the Adobe AIR. I think I would learn quite fast by referring the sample applications. Can you let me know any Adobe AIR open source applications?
Thanks for your help.
Over 20 example apps (from Adobe):
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/samples_actionscript.html
The following sample applications will help you get started using Adobe AIR. These are basic applications built by Adobe engineers to demonstrate the capabilities of the runtime.
There are 75 air samples here http://code.google.com/p/jsairsamples/
You can thousands of code samples, implementation in the Tour De Flex app. This app is like a documentation and also a component library which shows small code implementation of what the components displayed can do.
You can get it here.

How to access device settings on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone?

Edited on April 29th, content changed
Hello everyone,
I recently bought a Sony Ericsson mobile phone and I would like to add a missing feature myself. In fact I cannot actually disable Internet connection in an easy way when roaming, which cost me a lot of money last time I moved away ... So I would like to develop a little application that would just replace the actual Internet configuration with a fake configuration to avoid auto-connections.
So what I would like to know is how can I access programmatically to my phone settings? I know that Sony Ericsson provides a SDK to run Java applications on its customised JVM. So what I am actually looking for is to know if they extended the J2ME functionality to fit their devices requirements.
This is not well documented so I am asking this question with the hope that someone here already had experience with development targeted for Sony Ericsson devices.
Thanks.
NB: This is a Sony Ericsson Elm which is based on the Sony Ericsson OS with SE Java Platform 8.5.
Edit: I accepted QuickRecipesOnSymbianOS answer as it gave me a clue on the only feature that could have helped me, but which is unfornatunately missing. The Sony Ericsson Java Platform is the only API I could use to develop real programs on my phone. But the JP-8.5 does not implement the JSR-307 package which could help me in managing APN. Thanks everyone for your help.
Well, I hope you got the great Vivaz phone, not the Satio.
In order to learn about Symbian OS C++, first go to the Foundation website.
Relevant plug: the latest introduction to Symbian OS C++ in book form is Quick Recipes on Symbian OS
For now, you won't find a better way than Symbian OS C++ to manipulate your handset access points.
JavaME simply doesn't have the correct APIs for this, at least not until JSR-307 is implemented.
I believe Qt isn't integrated quite tightly enough just yet either but that should change soon enough. Keep an eye on it.
Extending the Symbian Python runtime to do what you want would require some Symbian OS C++ anyway.
Yes you will need to use Symbian C++ to modify the CommDB, which holds the list of connections. It is quite painful to work with it directly, but there are some utility classes that can help you out. Take a look at CApSelect, CApDataHandler and CApAccessPointItem, all in the developer library.
And yes, these will work on all modern Symbian handsets, independent of brand.
Note: My answer below assumed it was about a symbian device. Since it was actually a J2me device none of the below applies
The easiest way to achieve what you want to do is probably to just remove all the "destinations" when you want to prevent auto connections. Otherwise the device will test each destination in turn until it finds one that works.
You can also set up your destinations so that they are not allowed to be used automatically. This setting must be done individually for each destination.
You can also group your destinations and set one of the groups to the default. If you set the default to an empty group you should not get any automatic connections.
Note that I have not tested any of these methods myself. When I roam I turn off automatic updates in the apps that use them. Some apps can even detect when you are roaming and avoid auto connects.
There are S60 apps available that improves the connection management of vanilla S60, but I do not know if any of them can help you with your problem.
If you are dead set on doing the programming yourself you have to use the C++ SDK for Symbian S60 available from Forum Nokia. Java ME does not allow you to manipulate the destinations of the device.
The Elm device should have (I haven't verified this) the access point API originally designed by Nokia. Not sure whether you can use it for the purpose you want though. The J2me developer guidelines available from developer.sonyericsson.com should have all the information you need.

Quickest way to build a simple Symbian app?

I have a Symbian 9.1 handset, Nokia E65, based on Nokia S60 series UI. I'd like to build a simple, full screen, graphic application. It should be able to display some text and pictures and have a basic interaction from the keyboard. That's for me only, not to be deployed.
Now, what do you think is the quickest and most painless way to have it done?
I have the following skills:
- HTML, PHP, ASP.net, JS
- ASP.net and C#, Silverlight
- Java, but mostly for networking, not UI
- Some C++
I have downloaded the Nokia IDE, but it is scary at first sight :)
Any tutorial or example are welcome!
Edit:
In particular, two questions:
is there a possibility to make a stand-alone flash application for that handset?
how about the QT mobile version?
For your device, definitely use Python for S60. It is much easier to start with than Symbian's C++ SDK and in case you ever need more low level functionality than python gives you, you can write small modules in c++ and use them in your Python program.
For a simple application like the one you are describing, Python will do just fine. You don't even need any of Nokia's IDEs / tools on the PC, you can just write the code in any text editor, copy it to the phone and test it live.
As others have mentioned, other options include:
Symbian C++ SDK : As you have discovered the tools and not the most intuitive to work with, development is not straight forward either.
Nokia's WRT : Using javascript/css/html, but it is not available for your phone.
Qt : Not available for your phone.
Java Me : Probably your second best option, your code will be slightly larger but more protable. The tools are not as straight forward as with Python, but definitely not as complicated as with Symbian.
If you think you may like to do some further development on the Symbian platform in future, I'd strongly suggest looking at Qt. Unfortunately, however, you can't use it on your E65, since Qt requires S60 3.1 or higher. (The E65 runs S60 3.0).
Since Qt coding in done in C++, you also have access to native platform APIs if required. For most apps however, the (considerably more user-friendly) Qt APIs provide all the functionality you need.
Depending on your background, the learning curve may be steeper than using Java or Python, but the pay-off is that you get access to a very powerful toolkit. And of course, as long as you use only Qt APIs, your app should be easily portable to other Qt platforms if necessary.
Go for Java ME.
All the things you list in your post is possible to do in Java.
The Symbian SDK for C++ can be downloaded here.
NSBasic is another option.
Kindness,
Dan
May I suggest Python? For newer Symbian handsets I'd recommend Web Runtime (WRT), but it is not supported on good old E65.
I'm obviously biased but I would suggest getting the 2D graphics example code from the "Quick Recipes On Symbian OS" book:
If you know HTML and JS already, you should be able to write a Web widget for your Symbian device pretty easily, using the tools available through Forum Nokia. More info here:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Web_Technologies/Web_Runtime/
These widgets are standalone full screen applications that use the device WebKit browser engine for rendering and UI. You can also use keyboard inputs and customize the softkeys if you wish.

Fireworks or AIR?

I need to write a desktop application that can run on Mac (Windows and Linux soon) that can get data from MySQL and allow users to transfer files from their desktop to the server.
I know I can write a desktop app in AIR, how would Fireworks play into this?
Can AIR connect to MySQL?
Can one FTP files with AIR?
On a second note, can one write such applications as a ring-tone maker, a disk repair/partitioning utility in AIR? I know AIR uses web technology, but what other thigns are possible?
-Jason
Do you mean Adobe Fireworks? I would use Fireworks for the interface design. It also has some customizable assets.
Here is the product page where they have a lot more info on what it's capable of.
http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/features/?view=topnew
An AIR application is a desktop version of a Flash Application. So anything you can do in a Flash Application you can do in an AIR application. Flash Apps work with MySQL so you should be able to get an AIR app to work with MySQL.
AIR apps can also access the local file system. For instance you can write an AIR file loader application.
Fireworks is my design tool of preference. If you are working with digital graphics there is little need to look beyond FW to things like Photoshop and Illustrator. All of the CS5 software intro screens were designed in Fireworks. It has the best 32 bit PNG output I have seen and the colors are dead on without that issue from PS changing its output from the authoring environment.
From experience, I would not recommend spending time with AIR. Web apps are the way to go and the investment in a desktop or even mobile specific device app is going to be tough to justify because of programming maintenance costs, version releases and the speed new technology is released.
You could use Fireworks for the creation of images for the UI ( User Interface ) for most parts its okay enough, if you need advanced shadowing and color options you can look into photoshop, but fireworks is just great for the basic graphical stuff.
Im not sure if you question was maybe related to the UI since fireworks itself should have nothing to do with building the Air application.
You can use different solutions to build your air application, maybe off topic but if you have not decided how to build the AIR app I would look into Adobe Flash Builder 4,5, flex and the AIR development library's. Flex is also great to easily change the user interface (CSS) where you could create the images with fireworks :)

How to decide whether I should use AIR or Titanium

I may want to create a RIA but am wondering, whether Adobe AIR or Titanium is the way to go.
Do you think the open source version will last longer? Will it be better in anyway?
Just in case anyone comes back to this post, I'll add my 2 cents.
Titanium has come along way in the last few months. It now has support for Ruby and Python. You can code your own modules in C++ (eg, IRC) and compile Titanium to have support for that module (Or you can code modules in Py/Ru/JS).
You can use flex, flash and silverlight all within Titanium. All have been tested and work without a hitch :)
Although AIR isn't open source yet, the technology stack it's on (Flex, Webkit, etc) is open source. Titanium definitely looks promising but has no where near the momentum and support AIR has yet. Until it's been actually released and has several production apps running on it I wouldn't bet too much on it.If you're looking to get involved in an open source project and actually work and help develop it that's something else...
Just to clarify, AIR lets you use HTML/js to build your apps as well.
Neither, as both technologies are for creating desktop applications not RIAs.
Now if you were to ask how should you build your RIA... so that when, if, it comes to a point of you making a desktop version, which technology should you use, Flex or Javascript/HTML?
The answer becomes obvious once you decide between Flex or Javascript/HTML. If you do Flex then your desktop application will be in AIR; If you do Javascript/HTML your Descktop app will be in Titanium.
My suggestion, go with Flex - Air. Both are environments where State is made easy. Flex are written much like client (desktop) applications anyway as they have state.