The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development (Friends of ed Adobe Learning Library) [Paperback]

Marco Casario (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 2008 | Series: Friends of ed Adobe Learning Library

We all know what a great tool Flash is for creating dynamic, engaging web content, and Adobe's CS4 release just makes it even better. Among the newer features is the ability to take all the power of Flash for the Web and put in on the desktop using AIR. AIR capability is built right into the Flash CS4 integrated development environment, which means you can start writing desktop applications right away.

This book not only covers the essentials of using Flash with AIR (and AIR with Flash), but also shows you how to extend application functionality in new ways. Once you've got Flash on the desktop, you're no longer constrained by the limitations of running inside a web browser. You'll have access to the local desktop file system, and AIR adds SQLite functionality for native database support. And just as Flash animations have a consistent look and feel across browsers, AIR allows you to create applications that work consistently across operating systems—Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

For any Flash developer who wants to go from the Web to the desktop (and who doesn't?), this book is required reading. It not only tells you how to do it, but is full of practical, easy-to-follow examples that will have you building desktop AIR applications with Flash in no time. Expanding your existing Flash skills with the Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development will make you an even more potent and indispensable force on any development team!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Marco Casario is one of the most dynamic developers and consultants in the Adobe world. He has been passionate about informatics since he was little more than a child, and used to program games in Basic for Commodore 64 before dedicating himself, while still very young, to innovative projects for the web using Flash and Director (as far back as versions 3 and 5). In 2001, he began to collaborate with Macromedia Italia. Since that year, he has produced and headed a long series of presentations, conferences and articles, which you can find listed in detail in his blog, RIAvolutionize the Web (Casario.blogs.com), which is receiving several thousands of unique visitors every day. In 2005, Marco founded Comtaste (Comtaste.com), a company dedicated to exploring new frontiers in rich Internet applications and the convergence between the web and the world of mobile devices; MobyMobile (MobyMobile.com) and YouThru (YouThru.com) are representative of their work. Marco is the is founder of the biggest worldwide Flash Lite User Group (groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashLite) and of AugItaly.com, a reference point for the Italian community of Adobe users, for which he carries out the role of channel manager for the section dedicated to Flex (AugItaly.com/FlexGala.) Marco is busy working on the development (in Flex) of a very ambitious project concerning bank counters at European level, and in various consulting and Flex and Flash Media Server training activities for the realisation of rich Internet applications on behalf of buyers of the calibre of Capgemini, IBM partners, and Adobe Systems Software Ireland, Ltd.

Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: friendsofED; 1 edition (December 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430215887
• ISBN-13: 978-1430215882
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,332,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marco has been passionate about informatics since he was little more than a child and used to program games in Basic for Commodore 64 before dedicating himself, while still very young, to innovative projects for the web using Flash and Director.
In 2001, he began to collaborate with Macromedia Italy. Since that year he has produced and headed a long series of presentations, conferences and articles, which you can find listed in detail in his blog (casario.blogs.com), which is currently receiving several thousands of unique visitors every day.

In 2005, Marco has founded Comtaste (www.comtaste.com,) a company dedicated to exploring new frontiers in Rich Internet Applications and the convergence between the web and the world of mobile devices. Now his focus is on the cloud computing with the Google Apps platform and APIs and Google App Engine.

Marco has dedicated most of his time in sharing his knowledge and project experiences, in fact he is founder of the biggest worldwide Flash Lite user group (groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashLite/) and of www.augitaly.com, a reference point for the Italian community of Adobe users, in which he carries out the role of Channel Manager for the section dedicated to Flex (www.augitaly.com/flexgala.). Recently he also runs the Google Technology User Group in Milan, the Google technologies community (www.gtug.it).

Marco is an Adobe Certified Instructor for Flex 3 an AIR (ACI) and an Adobe CertifiedExpert for: Livecycle Platform, Flash, and Dreamweaver.

He is author of the following book project:

Flex 4 Cookbook (O'Reilly)
Professional Flash Catalyst: Building User Experiences for RIA (Wrox)
AIR Cookbook (O'Reilly)
Flex 4 Cookbook (O'Reilly)
Professional Flash Catalyst (Wrox)
Flex 4 Solutions (FriendsOfED)
Advanced AIR Applications (FriendsOfED)
The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR developmet
Flex Solutions: Essential Tecniques for Flex 3 developers (FOED)

Other co-author and technical editor's jobs are:

Professional Flex 2
Essential Flash 8
Flash Application for mobile devices

Speaking Engagements:

FATC New York
TAC Singapore
MAX Europe
MAX San Francisco
FlashOnTheBeach
FlexCamp London
MultiMania Belgium
FITC
360Flex Europe
AJAXWorld Conference New York
O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit
Adobe MAX 2007: Extending Flex Components
AdobeLive 2007

Specialties:
Marketing, Sales, Entrepreneurism, Cloud Computing, HTML5, Flex, LiveCycle Data Services, BlazeDS, AIR, JEE, Actionscript 3, Flash, Flash Lite, Google Apps, Google App Engine, GWT

Contact Marco Casario on LinkedIN: http://it.linkedin.com/in/marcocasario
Follow Marco Casario on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/marcocasario

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flash CS4, ActionScript 3 and AIR SDK, April 4, 2009

By 

Diane Cipollo (Editor at BellaOnline.com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development (Friends of ed Adobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

Until now, if you wanted to create a desktop application, you needed to use a programming language such as C# and Visual Studio. Another option was to use a web language such as PHP and have your pseudo desktop application run through a web browser on your desktop. But with the newest release of Adobe Flash CS4 and AIR, we now have a much easier way to build desktop applications that perform the same across Linus, Mac OS and Windows. This book by Marco Casorio is a good way to learn the basics of working with Flash CS4, ActionScript 3 and AIR together. As you progress through the book, you learn how to build AIR projects, piece by piece, from layout design and creating each part of the application to debugging and publishing. You will need a good foundation of ActionScript 3 and have Flash CS4 and AIR 1.5 installed on your computer. You can download sample files for the book at the author's companion site flashcs4air.comtaste.com.

Casorio begins by discussing the new features in Flash CS4 and the AIR SDK. Next, you take a look at a few simple applications, a media player and a weather widget. You also discuss the startup process for building your application including the XML descriptor file, digital certificate and publishing parameters. Moving on, you begin to work with OOP classes that control the main features of your application window and its contents. The supporting examples are a photo gallery and a text editor that uses Flash components.

All applications have menus with commands to perform tasks such as controlling files on your local system. Casorio covers the many types of menus that you might want to add to your application and how to use ActionScript classes to create and program these menus. You also learn how to use the XMLMenu class to generate your custom menu from XML.

Moving on, you learn how to program your application to communicate with your local file system and control files, folders, dialog boxes, the clipboard and the drag and drop function. From here, you advance to the operating system and learn tasks such as launching an application on login or from a webpage, associating file types with your application and programming system alerts for both Windows and Mac. You will also learn about the AIR Webkit engine, the Acrobat Reader plug-in and how to control multimedia files.

Although most people will be reading this book to learn about making desktop applications, the author covers how to work with the AIR HTML engine to load, cache, display and manipulate HTML and JavaScript. You will use a template application as a starting point for creating applications with functions such as monitoring connectivity for working both on and off the web. Next, you will cover how to manipulate a database from your application. Finally, you will learn your options for publishing, distributing and installing your application.

Marco Casorio is an Adobe developer and consultant. He has authored several books on Adobe AIR and Flex.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Essentail Guide to Flash CS4 Air Development, July 31, 2010

By 

Dan Abramovich - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development (Friends of ed Adobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

The book is ok. But if you like to do some of the examples in this book, be aware that about 50% of them don't work. I contacted the author and publisher with no response.

I call this a "rip-off". And, this would be the last time I purchase a book from this author.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Obsolete. No errata support. Incomplete supporting software., July 24, 2010

By 

Web Developer (Downingtown, PA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development (Friends of ed Adobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

Obsolete, but still sold as new/useful:

The book covers AIR 1.5 when 2.5 is ready.

No errata support:

There are many links in the book (important ones, like how to programatically update your application) that are now dead. This happens in print material. But there is no web page containing updates to these dead links. The reader is left on their own.

Incomplete supporting software:

The book is based on lengthy code snippets. Often new concepts are covered by copying to new pages the complete routines/applications; only switching a parm or one API call to discuss different the different points -- perhaps to fill up pages?). The accompanying software download (Ess_Guide_Flash_CS4_AIR_Dev.zip) only contains a portion of the code in the book.

Most interesting, is there are some chapters in the software download that are 0 length files. For one example, in ch06p02; the .swf and main code are 0 length (empty) and the .fla has a seek error. How did this pass the book's technical edit review? And why hasn't it been corrected, working towards 2 years later?

The reader is left to type in large chunks of code directly from the book. The book code/accompanying software combo may useful as a typing tutor; but much less so as a code reference point.

An email to the author on this was ignored.