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Back in May of this year I wrote a news article about the Google Maps API and AS3. Great we though here come some fantastic AIR app map mashups, however that was not to be and broke the terms of service for the API.

Now I have been informed by Google that the Maps API does now fully support Adobe AIR applications! According to Pamela Fox who works on the API team, it’s all go for AIR apps with maps with the latest update and the terms of service have been altered too. There is a supporting ...

Blimey Adobe have been very busy and there is now so much focus on AIR and AIR applications, it’s an exciting time.
Adobe announced a few days ago a new pre-release program called Adobe Wave.

It’s a desktop notifications system using a hosted API by Adobe to enable single call updates for trusted social networks and newsletters. It is a SaS (Software as a service) system by Adobe using a REST API that gives developers the ability to reach users without having their own desktop presence like ...

The new Adobe software code named Thermo has been demoed at conferences and online quite a bit since Max last year. It is still very much in pre-release development however Adobe have released the actual product name for Thermo – Flash Catalyst. I think it is a very good name due to the very nature of where the tool sits within the new CS4 suite and upcoming Flex 4.

If your not familiar with what the application offers, it works with the new FXG format that Adobe is integrating with Flex 4 ...

Yes the next big release for Adobe AIR is finally out in the wild. The pre-release guys have had access for a while but now all of you can get the latest update and start playing with Flash player 10 goodies, encrypted local database and for HTML developers the new JavaScript engine Squirrelfish that offers up to 35% faster performance.

So head on over to the download center to grab yourself the new SDK and go here for the Adobe AIR runtime.

Adobe have been hard at work getting Growl support for AIR applications when used on the Mac OS X platform. While you can achieve cross platform notifications using AIR, Mac fans appreciate the Growl integration of native apps and it has been requested many times.

So Mike Chambers has announced that they have been working with the Growl team and it is now possible to get Growl support into your AIR application. Read the blog post as you will need to get the bleeding edge version of Growl and ...

Everyone is jumping on the desktop bandwagon these days. So Yahoo have come to the part with BrowserPlus. It is a a way of getting web apps to have desktop capabilities.
They look to be offering a set of JavaScript API’s which you can try in the Service Explorer.

I don’t see this as competing product to Adobe AIR however it’s an interesting concept to be aware of. Check out the API and the support forums.

Recently I have seen many sites offering AIR installer files for their application only to find that thy are not being delivered using the correct MIME type. This means the browser thinks that the AIR file is a compressed ZIP file and on my Mac gives the .air a .zip extension as well.

To many new users to AIR this can be confusing and some are not sure why the AIR app is not auto installing. This can be a big drop out point for your new users well before they have even started the AIr ...

For those of you on a Mac who do any kind of development there stands a good chance that you own a copy of Textmate. I came across a new bundle for Adobe AIR that you can add to your installation. Check it out here.

Ted Patrick has started to collate a list of ActionScript 3 API’s primarily for the Adobe MAX keynote but should be a great source of info for all you AIR mashup people out there.
https://adobemax.dabbledb.com/page/cloudapis/IylZKLSG

Fround this useful link from a post on Twitter about how to trick Adobe AIR into installing properly on OS X (10.5.4). Not had any issues myself, although looking through the coments it seems to a have been a workable solution to a few.

So check out Andrew Petersons post out here.

Adobe AIR 1.5 SDK (code named Cosmos) is now being included with the latest Flex 3 nightly builds. Aiming to bring the build process of Flex and AIR tighter together. There are some great things mentioned like the new JavaScript engine SquirrelFish, and fixes for the annoying opening of new browser windows.

Mike Chambers has a detailed post on the developments so check out his post.

TO get you hands on the nightly builds head on over to the Adobe Open Source site for Flex.

Over at the Adobe Dev Centre there is an interesting article covering some common mistakes when developing AIR applications. It’s written by AIR guru David Tucker who is an AIR and Flex developer for Universal Mind.
So go and give it a read, you’d be mad not to.

Adobe’s Mike Chambers has listed some URLs that detail error codes within Adobe AIR. So if you get cryptic error codes and are having trouble tracking them down try these links.

List of runtime errors in Adobe docs

Adobe Developer Toolkit (ADT) error codes

If you do then Mike Chambers from Adobe would like to hear them. Check out his blog post here and send in a comment with the issues that you have.

Yahoo have announced an API for their music service. Detailed on programmableweb the service is REST based and allows for JSON, XML and RSS responses. Requests are currently limited to 5000 per day although if your using AIR you will be caching your results locally. Should be interesting to see what apps evolve out of the music API. There is also a support forum setup for this API.