Multimediacollege Afterhours

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.

Related posts:

1. Adobe’s Christmas Presents
2. There was something in the AIR last night
3. Adobe Flex Seminars
4. Afterhours Mega Session 2006
5. AfterHours Mega Session 2006 review