Maptacular was one of the first applications I wrote for AIR. The first version parsed vCards from your local file system, and let you map the addresses it found inside. That was back when AIR was in still in alpha, so I didn't have APIs for things like drag and drop or copy and paste. Now that AIR 1.0 has shipped, I decided to rewrite Maptacular to to have the functionality that I originally envisioned. I created a screencast of Maptacular 2.0 which you can watch here.

I did a screencast of an Exchange calendaring application I wrote for AIR. Click here to watch it. It's one of the most useful applications I've written so far, and probably the most popular within Adobe. It lets you view your Exchange calendar, and it notifies you of upcoming meetings. It also works offline, so you can view your calendar and get meeting details while you're between internet connections.

I got my own certificate for signing AIR applications a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I'd share my experience in order to help others more easily navigate the process. My intention is not to provide an exhaustive tutorial on code signing or the process of obtaining a certificate (if that's what you're looking for, see Todd Prekaski's article entitled Digitally Signing Adobe AIR Applications).

Note: Apprise is now available at apprisereader.com. I did a screencast of the RSS aggregator called Apprise that I wrote for AIR. Click here to watch it. I didn't put any effort into designing the app, so it looks pretty plain, but it's very functional. All the source code for apprise is available here on Google Code. You can install Apprise by clicking on the badge below.

One of the biggest benefits of AIR is that applications can be written to easily function whether online or off. Features like file access and a local SQL database give developers the functionality they need to write applications that can pull data from remote data sources while connected, but can also rely on cached data while disconnected. Of course, writing an application that functions seamlessly both online and offline requires that you be able to reliably detect whether you have a connection or not.

If you're reading my blog, I'm going to assume that you already know what AIR is. If you don't, have a look at the official AIR product page before reading any further. Rather than tell you what you probably already know about AIR, I'd like to mention a few things that people might not have realized yet. AIR isn't just another Adobe product. It isn't just a new tool or utility. It's an entirely new way to develop, deploy, install, and use desktop applications. Entirely new.

I used to use Linux every day for about four years before coming to work for Macromedia/Adobe (over five years ago). My favorite tools were Screen, Pine, Centericq, XMMS, and Vim. My window manager of choice was FVWM which was doing fast and stable virtual desktops before anyone even knew what virtual desktops were. But I had to leave all that behind when I moved over to the world of Flash and Flex development.

I keep forgetting how to do this, so I'm going to blog it once and for all. First of all, it's possible to have transparent HTML in AIR. I don't just mean changing the alpha of the HTML Flex component. That's one way to do it, but that's not terribly useful. I'm talking about entirely knocking out the background of an HTMLLoader (formerly know as the HTMLControl) so that you can do very cool things like custom HTML chrome.

If you've started building an AIR application, you probably noticed that your application icons don't appear when launching your app via ADL (ADL is the AIR Debug Launcher, and is what Flex Builder uses to launch and debug your apps). Platform specific icons are created from the PNG files referenced in your application descriptor file at install time which means they aren't available during development.

The most important part of my job is writing AIR applications, and I've written quite a few. In addition to applications, my team and I have written a great deal of reusable ActionScript library code (Amazon S3 APIs, Exchange APIs, etc.). Everything I've written is completely free and open source. The problem is that I haven't done a very good job in keeping these applications and libraries synchronized with the the publicly available version of AIR. It's not that I'm lagging behind, though.