I was super excited to give a session at Flash Camp London today to Flash creatives from around the UK.
The camp was aimed more at the designer and creative side of Flash and we wanted to show some of the new and shiny features of Flash CS4. Some great speakers attended and I was honored to have presented on the same bill as some of the most renowned and respected individuals in the Flash scene.
My session was to show how easy it is to create a cross platform desktop application using the new AIR features of Flash CS4, then how to seamlessly deploy the application using the installer badge on a webpage.
AIR applications are super easy to do now in Flash which leaves you more time to work on the creative and interactive side of your AIR apps.
I cover building a simple chromeless AIR application called 'Flash Camp Chatter' that gets the last 4 tweets about Flash camp from Twitter and displays them in floating clouds, not exactly going to set the world alight but fine for a quick demo. You can try the application using the installer badge at the end of this post.
The application is simple and it's left up to the reader to add extra features like animation, effects, more error handling etc. The application is shown merely as a proof of how to create a custom chrome AIR applications quickly in Flash CS4.
As the session was only 30 minutes long it was always going to be difficult to squeeze in all of the content I wanted to show. The slide deck here is more detailed than the one I used on the day.
Session slides
Demo files
Download a ZIP file containing all of the demo files.
You will have to create your own Digital Certificate and in order to re-export the AIR files from Flash CS4. To properly test the installer badge your AIR file must be located on a web server and the server must have the correct MIME type for AIR (see example below for Apache):
AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip .air
