Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide Flash CS4 AIR Development (Friends of ed Adobe Learning Library)

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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.

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.

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.

I know people were disappointed in this book. If you're learning from scratch, this probably isn't the right manual. It did cover a lot of topics that I needed to know more about. The advantage of the book is that the material is all in one place (instead of searching 'how to...').
The code samples don't all work, but I did understand what was being attempted and made my own modifications. I hope for an Air 3.0 book from this group. Just fine tune it before it's released.