Peter Elst

FITC is coming to Amsterdam next month and am very happy to be speaking there along with lots of fantastic international speakers, friends and colleagues from the Benelux and several Adobe evangelists.

If you’ve never been to an FITC, Shawn Pucknell and the team do a fantastic job making it an event to remember with lots of opportunities to network and party with fellow attendees and speakers.

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I had a great time last night presenting a hands-on session on Adobe AIR API’s at Multimediacollege — thanks to Frederik and the rest of the team for having me over!

The presentation was likely still a bit rough round the edges but people seemed genuinely interested, got some good feedback and will present a more polished version at FITC in Amsterdam next month.

While playing around with the sample code I prepared, we came across some inconsistencies between Mac and PC and things that wouldn’t quite work (its still in beta so you can expect to run across those once in a while).

One of the things that we found is that flash.net.FileFilter on Mac works fine without using a wildcard character but you need it in there to work properly on PC.

var htmlFilter:FileFilter = new FileFilter(“HTML”, “html”);
var htmlFilter:FileFilter = new FileFilter("HTML", "*.html");

The other thing we found was that you can’t addChild Flex components to the stage property a NativeWindow instance (pure AS3, such as a new TextField() still works though). I remember I came across this issue in the previous beta but the solution completely slipped my mind. What you do is use the mx.core.Window class, make a Flex component that extends <mx:Window /> or simply instantiate it directly.

var myWin:Window = new Window();
myWin.type = NativeWindowType.UTILITY;
myWin.width = 400;
myWin.height = 400;
myWin.title = "Adobe AIR is amazing";
myWin.open();

Kristof Neirynck has a a little review of the event on his blog that prompted me to write this entry. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with the runtime so should have some more AIR related posts coming up in the next few weeks.