pifantastic » air

Creating .dmg Files with Adobe AIR 2 and OSX

Aaron — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:50:39 +0000

Recently I needed to develop a method for creating password protected backups of my application’s data. The original idea was to create a password protected zip file which I could just do using /usr/bin/zip. Unfortunately, the OSX archiver utility cannot open password protected zip files, making it very difficult for users to actually open the zip files.

So after a bit of research I came across http://github.com/andreyvit/yoursway-create-dmg. This guy has created an awesome little shell script that allows you to create .dmg files with pretty backgrounds and all sorts of other things. I forked it here so that I could add the ability to set a password. And then I just execute the shell file using the NativeProcess API built in to Adobe AIR 2. Here is the javascript:

Anatomy of an AIR Build Script (Windows)

Aaron — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:58:35 +0000

Building AIR applications isn’t particularly difficult, but I thought someone may benefit from seeing the super simple python script I use to build the AIR app I am currently working on.

It allows you to do three things: run your app in the debugger, create a new self signed certificate, and build the final .air application file. It assumes the following directory structure (but you can easily edit the script to customize this):

root/
	index.html
	application-descriptor.xml
	/js
	/css
	/locale
	/icons

When finished building it places your .air file into a subdirectory called “build”.

seltzer, A Simple Javascript Interface for SQLite in Adobe AIR

Aaron — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:12:30 +0000

I’ve recently started my first project using Adobe AIR. When it came out a few years ago I did what most people did and said, “Oh, cool”, and then immediately forgot about it. But after reviewing several ways of solving this latest project, we realized that AIR was perfect.

AIR lets you choose what you develop with: Flex, Flash or Javascript+HTML+CSS. I chose Javascript because lately I’ve seen how powerful of a language it can be. Also I don’t know Flash or Flex :)

The AIR javascript API has support for SQLite databases which is totally awesome. My project has a fairly simple database and I wanted an easy way to interact with it. Thus, I created seltzer. I don’t really know why I called it that, I guess AIR reminds me of airy things. Like alka-seltzer?

You can download/fork/ignore completely the project on github. I’ve written some unit tests with QUnit but it still needs a lot of work. Hopefully by the end of my current project it will be breathing fire and lazer-blasting planets. In a good way.

Here is an example of how the API works. Like I said, it’s dead simple.

And here is a screenshot of the QUnit badassery: