Hi. I am Sam. Production Director at These Days. I’m no developer, I’m no Flash wizard, I’m no jQuery guru. But I like to play around with ‘techy stuff’. And since this labs blog is about sharing said ‘techy stuff’, well… don’t mind if I do 
I like to believe that there are others like me that don’t think they are gods like half of my department and even find my writings of value
So here I was, searching the web to see how I could make my first AIR app and whaddaya know … it wasn’t all that difficult.
I used:
- Windows 7
- Editplus (notepad alike)
- Windows command prompt
- AIR sdk
So if you are on a mac .. sorry, can’t help ya m8
Step 0: Realizing that I can’t do any Flash shizzle so if I want to make an AIR app I’ll need to use HTML & Javascript
Step 1: Download AIR (http://get.adobe.com/air/)
Step 2: Download the AIR SDK (http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/)
(OPTIONAL) Step 3: Change your environment path (on Windows 7 you can do this by going into Computer properties > Advanced system settings > Environment variables > add ;c:\air\bin\; to System variable “Path”) > Is just to make everything more easy.
Step 4: Create folder MyFirstAIRapp on your desktop
Step 5: Create folders MyFirstAIRapp\source & MyFirstAIRapp\build
Step 6: Create \source\application.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0">
<id>examples.sp.helloworld</id>
<filename>helloWorld</filename>
<version>1</version>
<name>Hello World</name>
<description>My first AIR app - Hello World</description>
<initialWindow>
<content>index.html</content>
<visible>true</visible>
<width>300</width>
<height>200</height>
</initialWindow>
</application>
Step 7: Create \source\index.html
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title> My first AIR app - Hello world </title>
<meta name="author" content="Sam Serrien" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Step 8: Test it > Open the Command prompt and go into your source folder to build
c:\MyFirstAIRapp\source\> adl application.xml
…and see your app at work
Step 9: Create a certificate (unsigned but who cares)
c:\MyFirstAIRapp\source\> adt -certificate -cn SelfSigned 1024-RSA
../cert.pfx 1234
1234 is your password, you’ll need this to compile the app
Step 10: Compile your app and call yourself an AIR application developer :p
c:\MyFirstAIRapp\source\> adt -package -storetype pkcs12 -keystore ../cert.pfx
../build/HelloWorld.air application.xml .
Use your password (in my case 1234) et voila.
Offcourse I realise that this is doing it ‘the hard way’. Tools do exists:
- Aptana studio: http://www.aptana.com/
- Dreamweaver CS4 plugin: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/ajax/
Happy scripting
