Lets help Adobe

Posted by Simon in AIR, Flash, Flex, RIA on Feb 8th, 2010 | 0 comments

If you follow any of the Adobe guys involved in Flash and AIR on Twitter, you may have come across a few tweets regarding improving Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

It is pretty simple process, just follow these steps:

Also, please spread the word on Twitter – Improve Flash 10.1 & AIR 2.0 via Beta 2 http://bit.ly/cty7Nm READ & RT #Flash #AIR #QUALITY

Adobe AIR 2.0 Beta 2 Released

Posted by Simon in AIR, Flash, Flex on Feb 3rd, 2010 | 0 comments

Discussing New Printing Features in the AIR 2 Beta 2 from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.

Adobe® have released AIR® 2 beta 2 on Adobe Labs. Adobe AIR 2 provides end users with exceptional application experiences while giving developers the easiest and most powerful way to develop desktop applications across multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux).

AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities, and even tighter integration with the desktop. Some new features of AIR 2 include:

  • Enhanced support for interacting with printers (beta 2)
  • Support for TLS/SSL socket communication (beta 2)
  • Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
  • Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
  • Support for native code integration.
  • The ability to open a file with its default application.
  • Multi-touch and gesture support.
  • New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
  • Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
  • Global error handling.
  • Improved cross-platform printing
  • Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Two new features that developers may be particularly interested in are the following:

  • Print Job Enhancements
    New properties and methods have been added to the PrintJob class to give you better control of the way content is printed from an AIR application, including the choice of printer, paper size, and number of copies. New properties also give you more information about the printer, such as printable area, whether the printer will print in color, and whether the print job is currently active. The new PrintJobOptions.printMethod property allows you specify whether to use bitmap or vector printing. The PrintJobOptions.pixelsPerInch property allows you to specify the resolution of print jobs. The new PrintUIOptions class allows you to control how much the end user can change the page range to be printed. See PrintJob, PrintJobOptions, and PrintUIOptions.
  • TLS/SSL Sockets
    You can now connect to a server that requires TLSv1 or SSLv3 for socket communications. See SecureSocket.

For a complete list of features and to see what’s new in beta 2, please refer to the Release Notes. For an overview of the new features in AIR 2, please take a look at the following:

The AIR 2 Public beta is your opportunity to explore new features and communicate your feedback. Please remember that that this is beta software, so there will be bugs, incomplete features, some performance issues, and some missing documentation. Therefore, please use the AIR 2 beta only for testing and exploratory purposes.