As if Flash Lite development combined with FMS wasn't enough fun already I decided to start yet another side project, this time using AIR. The idea behind the project is to build (yet another) webcam snapshot tool - but with a twist.

I use Freeagent for my company accounts (which I can highly recommend btw - just note that multiple currency support is in the works and not yet supported - sorry to be harping on about this Olly ;-) and I would like to have a little tool that lets me capture, upload and attach receipts and other paper related snippets to specific transactions. Luckily, Freeagent have a cool API which I think will allow me to achieve what I want.

Here's an interesting video of a discussion on RIA technologies including Silverlight, Flex and AIR. Sam Stokes, academic developer/evangelist at Microsoft Corporation and Kevin Hoyt, platform evangelist at Adobe represented the two sides.
You can watch the video here - but be warned, the viewing experience isn't great, especially if you are on a Mac.

The blogosphere is flooded with info on Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 today and I won't add much to the noise apart from pointing you here and here to find out more. Great job Flex team!

Adobe have just launched the prerelease 2 version of their Adobe Media Player (AMP). This second version brings the Player in line with Beta 3 of AIR, Adobe's cross platform desktop runtime, and it adds a few new features such as H.264 support, hardware acceleration for fullscreen playback as well as new video scaling options during playback.

According to Beet.tv, who have a video interview with Chris Hock, the Adobe Media Player will be delayed until next year. A beta is expected this year.
I'm not sure if the player had been announced for this year or not but in any case it's not long now, even if the release is indeed pushed forward a bit.
I have been lucky enough to see some demos of the Adobe Media player and it's a very nice app and worth the wait in any case ;-)

Here's another video from video.onflex.org. In it you can see Deeje Cooley demoing some more of the upcoming Adobe Media Player, codenamed Philo. Watch the video here.

Enjoy.

It's great to see a publication such as The Register identify Apollo as a useful alternative to traditional web apps. I also love the subheader... :-)
Read the article here.

Here's a video chat app (uses FMS) that I ported to Apollo. It's a in essence a Flex application that uses none of Apollo's functionality but merely wraps the my Flex app that's online here into an .air installer. The Apollo client connects to the same server as the browser based app which is kinda cool.

Here's the Apollo runtime which you need to run my app (Win or Mac).

Here's the Apollo installer for my app.

What's cool to note is that I managed to port what's essentially a browser app onto the desktop in something like 30 mins. The code changes were almost non-existend.
You *will* get a warning with this installer that the app may access your file system (as any executable may do). However this app does not.
To uninstall you can run the installer again and then choose uninstall or remove it via the normal means (add/remove programs if you're on Win). Not tested on Mac but with a bit of luck it'll run there too I think ;-)

Haven't you heard? The Apollo runtime, SDK and documentation is now available on Adobe Labs.
This is a pre-release and as such targeted at developers. What is Apollo? According to Adobe it is 'the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.'
Enjoy.