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:airbin; to System variable “Path”) > Is just to make everything more easy.
Step 4: Create folder MyFirstAIRapp on your desktop
Step 5: Create folders MyFirstAIRappsource & MyFirstAIRappbuild
Step 6: Create sourceapplication.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 sourceindex.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:MyFirstAIRappsource> adl application.xml
…and see your app at work
Step 9: Create a certificate (unsigned but who cares)
c:MyFirstAIRappsource> 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:MyFirstAIRappsource> 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 :)
I was quite pleased when I found this article, but I got no where with it. For a start, when I download AIR, I get a zip, but no installer. Is there something to install? You don’t say. When I come to the command prompt, and enter what you entered, I get the usual error CMD gives you when you try to do something that isn’t recognised. You did everything on your desktop, yet your command line suggests you were doing it directly within the C:/ drive. More specific steps would be good.