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6 Months of AIR, What have you built?
| By Rich Tretola | August 26, 2008 | |
| 4,389 views |
This week marks 6 months since Adobe AIR was officially released. So my questions to you are the following. (please reply in comments as I am interested in seeing the communities opinions)
Feel free to include links to any applications that you are proud of and would like to share. Here are some of mine.
Topics: Adobe AIR, Flex | 21 Comments »
August 26th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Well, I been used Air for many things, widgets, mostly, it’s pretty interesting what you can do with such application like Air, embedded database with SQLite for local storage, it can be connected to any kind of database using languages like PHP, that is one of my favorites. And it’s also pretty easy to learn, I’m only have 2 months working with Flex.
I can’t post any of these applications, because their are copyrighted to the company that I’m working now.
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August 26th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Well, I’ve only built one little fun app. A video camera app that created an alert if someone was walking behind you. It was for a company “assassin” game.
It did help, but I’d forget to put the headphones back on and got killed. *lol* But it did help…
***
We’ll also looking at it’s use for some company projects as well.
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August 26th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I’ve built 3 commercial applications. They’re all Flex/AIR.
I have a 3rd category for internet connectivity that they all share. They are all stand alone desktop apps that can be used disconnected, but they all have some sort of web capabilities that extend the desktop app, not the other way around.
A project planning appliction:
http://www.agileagenda.com/
A time tracking application (1.0 soon to come out)
An educational timeline creation tool
http://www.tomsnyder.com/timelinerxe/
Those are all full featured desktop applications, the last one with about 4 man-years of development time behind it, so they’re fairly large efforts.
Plus I’ve done a handful of smaller toy/widget applications.
For cross platform development and distribution, you really can’t beat AIR.
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August 26th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Just released my first AIR app two weeks ago.
http://www.xehon.com
It’s free. I will be adding more free features and some locked ones.
Some parts work offline some online and some both on&offline. The main purpose of the app is media management which works in both on&offline. Data is stored localy and then syncronized to the server for remote access.
It was Build with AS3/AIR
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August 26th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Just published 3 DVDs running on AIR, in the bigger picture I have an as3/mxml engine that displays all our legacy and future contents, and runs 98% of the same code in AIR or flex, so deploying to our website or to plastic disk is largely straightforward. All data access is via sqlite on disk or remoting (flourineFx) on the web. apart from some preferences and file saving stuff, thats pretty well all I had to do.
Thumbs up from me, previously we maintained an app for windows, one for mac and a seperate web product, this is somewhat easier!
Taken me about a year to do on my own, not too bad considering the size of the project.
Marc just beat me to “first published AIR app on disk”, so his blog proclaims! grrrrrr.
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August 26th, 2008 at 11:05 am
We’ve used AIR (all Flex-based) for a variety of free, business products:
MeetingPulse for Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Pro: AIR-based, written using Flex framework, that allows users to monitor their Connect meeting rooms and be alerted to participants joining. Also provides graphs of usage patterns, etc… It’s available here: http://www.connectsolutions.com/content/meetingpulse.html
ConnectMonitor: This is also AIR-based, Flex-framework, and monitors a user’s Connect system to ensure availability. This app also logs all results to a Google App Engine backend, which made this a fun project overall.
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August 26th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
In more or less 6 months, in my spare time, I built Posty: http://spreadingfunkyness.com/posty/
It is a desktop front-end to six online services: twitter, jaiku, pownce, tumblr, friendfeed and identi.ca. You can update your statuses, visualize those of your friends and reply/comment.
It is a free application. I built it in Flex.
The only issue I had to face (and I am still facing) is the sometimes excessive memory usage. I hope Adobe will provide a deeper access to memory management, or a smarter garbage collector.
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August 26th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
We released an open source Flex debugging/logging application that works with both the Flex framework and the cim logging (pure AS3 / Flash CS3 )framework.
The source and installer is here:
http://code.google.com/p/cimlogbook/
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August 27th, 2008 at 1:59 am
I create 2 commercial applications made with Flex and AIR and I’ve done a lots of samples for a Flex & AIR course in an italian company.
One of those application is an image manipulator and the other one is a little CMS that manage data for a flash and flash lite apps
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August 27th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Here at Business Objects we used AIR to build a widget engine (so partly online/offline).
http://labs.businessobjects.com/biwidget/
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August 27th, 2008 at 4:58 am
I create only 1 commercial application with AIR for large photo finishing company. I use chart components and SQLite for store data. Some issues (export to xls and open Excel, special direct printing on Printer, reading bar code via serial port) are done in Java and there is communication bridge between Java and AIR application via socket.
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August 27th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I’ve been working on Spaz for over a year now, since Beta 1 of AIR. It’s an open-source Twitter client written in HTML and JavaScript. Definitely for fun; I certainly haven’t come close to breaking even
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August 28th, 2008 at 11:05 am
I’m a developer for http://www.wix.com and I built our CMS with AIR, using Flex builder.
AIR as a solution created some issues, as its restrictions on file accessing and inability to run external applications prevented us from developing many useful features.
But other than that, the CMS is installed on lots of computers here, being used by developers, graphic designers and content managers, and seems to hold up.
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Rich Tretola Reply:
August 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am
What do you mean by “restrictions on file accessing” ?
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RoyKlein Reply:
August 28th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Well, what we wanted to do is let the CMS automatically update files on the server, but opening files for upload always requires user input.
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Rich Tretola Reply:
August 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Opening files from the file system within an AIR application definitely does not require any user input.
If you are working within Flex in the browser, then you would need user input.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
We developed a sales forecasts management application for a fashion firm.
The AIR (Flex) UI connects to a Java backend via SOAP.
We discovered the poor quality of Flex components (ugly code and buggy) and had to implement a lot of hacks/workarounds.
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August 29th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Hello,
we have developed a product that allows users to send bulk sms. Besides messaging, it includes integration with social networks (currently facebook, twitter), supports rss, synchronization (through lcds) and other stuff.
It is currently on testing and will be released during September.
Have a look at the videos and screenshots at http://www.attenzosms.com
We are also running a contest about the name of the application so feel free to vote if you want.
BR
Thanos
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September 1st, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Hello,
I am a freelance Flash platform developer and I was involved in a project as the sole developer, where the objective was to build a childrens game. I recommended using AIR and so we did. The game is off-line, sold through swedish select retailers and built using Flash.
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September 26th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I built a cool Craigslist Browser for AIR.
Craigslist has lost of great data, but a lame interface. Browsing in AIR using CL Desktop is much better. Not just my um, unbiased opinion, but I’ve gotten great feedback from CL Desktop users.
Best of all, it’s free.
AIR Rocks!
Check it out at http://www.cldesktop.com
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September 27th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
We built an air applcation that is client for our white label desktop alerting system. Website publishers can take our air applcation and use it a message system for sending desktop alerts to their site users. http://www.elertz.com
An example of it in use can be seen here:
http://www.newzdog.com
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