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AIR 2:Release Notes

From Adobe Labs

Table of contents

Overview

This document contains system requirements, installation instructions, known issues, and other information about using the Adobe® AIR™ 2 Beta runtime and SDK.

IMPORTANT: Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 1 *will not run* using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 1 application to run on the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime, the namespace of the beta 1 application descriptor file must first be updated to "2.0beta2" and compiled against the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK.

System Requirements

Windows Macintosh Linux
Processor Minimum: Intel® Pentium® III 1GHz or faster processor Recommended: Pentium 4 2GHZ or faster Intel Core™ Duo 1.83GHz or faster processor. Minimum: Intel® Pentium® III 1GHz or faster processor Recommended: Pentium 4 2GHZ or faster
Operating System Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise including 64 bit editions, Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2 and SP3, Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 7 Mac OS 10.4, 10.5 or Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Fedora Core 12, Ubuntu 9.10, openSUSE 11.2.
RAM Minimum: 512MB RAM; Recommended: 1GB RAM Minimum: 512MB RAM; Recommended: 1GB RAM 1GB RAM

Note: Windows 2000 and Mac PowerPC are no longer supported. Users with these operating systems will continue to be able to install and run AIR 1.5 applications, but will not be able to install or update to AIR 2.

New Features in AIR 2 beta 2

IMPORTANT: Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 1 *will not run* using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 1 application to run on the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime, the namespace of the beta 1 application descriptor file must first be updated to "2.0beta2" and compiled against the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK.

Other Beta 2 changes

AIR SDK changes

There is a new AIRCore framework, which contains the service monitoring and URL file promise classes:

The SecureSocketMonitor class is a new addition to the service monitoring framework. It takes advantage of the new SecureSocket class available in AIR 2.

The AIRCore framework's URLFilePromise class used to included in the runtime, in the flash.desktop package.

The older service monitoring library files, servicemonitoring.swc and servicemonitoring.swf, are still included in the AIR 2 SDK, but use of these library files is deprecated. We recommend switching to the new aircore.swc in your Flex- and Flash-based applications, and switching to aircore.swf for HTML-based applications.

The AIR 2 SDK comes with two versions of the application update framework: frameworks/libs/air/applicationupdater_ui.swc (for Flex4) and frameworks/libs/air/flex3/applicationupdater_ui3.swc (for Flex3).

Features added in AIR 2 beta 1

NOTE: Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 1 *will not run* using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 1 application to run on the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime, the namespace of the beta 1 application descriptor file must first be updated to "2.0beta2" and compiled against the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK.

Note: To develop an application using AIR 2 features, you must update the application descriptor namespace to "http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/2.0beta2".

Documentation

The following documentation is available for the Adobe AIR 2 Beta

Adobe AIR Runtime

Note: It is not possible to have both Adobe AIR 1.5 and Adobe AIR 2 installed on the same machine.

Installing Adobe AIR 2

Use the following instructions to download and install the Windows®, Mac OS X, and Linux versions of AIR.

To install or update the runtime, a user must have administrative privileges for the computer.

Install the runtime on a Windows computer

  1. Download the runtime installation file.
  2. Double-click the runtime installation file.
  3. In the installation window, follow the prompts to complete the installation.

Install the runtime on a Mac computer

  1. Download the runtime installation file.
  2. Double-click runtime installation file.
  3. In the installation window, follow the prompts to complete the installation.
  4. If the Installer displays an Authenticate window, enter your Mac OS user name and password.

Install the runtime on a Linux computer

Using the binary installer
  1. Download the binary installation file.
  2. Set the file permissions so that the installer application can be executed:
    From a command line, you can set the file permissions with the chmod +x installer.bin command. Some versions of Linux allow you to set the file permissions on the Properties dialog opened through a context menu.
  3. Run the installer from the command line or by double-clicking the runtime installation file.
  4. In the installation window, follow the prompts to complete the installation.
Using native debian or rpm packages
  1. Download the native package, adobeair-2.0.0.11670.deb for debian based systems or adobeair-2.0.0.11670.rpm for rpm based systems.
  2. Double click on adobeair-2.0.0.11670.deb or adobeair-2.0.0.11670.rpm to install the runtime.
  3. You can use the native package manager to install the runtime:
For debian based systems:
sudo dpkg -i adobeair-2.0.0.11670.deb


For rpm based systems:
sudo rpm -i adobeair-2.0.0.11670.rpm


Note: AIR registers the mime type: application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip.

Removing Adobe AIR

Once you have installed the runtime, you can remove it using the following procedures.

Remove the runtime on a Windows computer

  1. In the Windows Start menu, select Settings > Control Panel.
  2. Select the Add or Remove Programs control panel.
  3. Select “Adobe AIR” to remove the runtime.
  4. Click the Change/Remove button.

Remove the runtime on a Mac computer

Double-click the “Adobe AIR Uninstaller”, which is located in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

Remove the runtime on a Linux computer

Do one of the following:

AIR 2 SDK

The AIR 2 SDK can be used on its own to develop HTML-based AIR applications or with the Flex SDK to develop ActionScript or Flex-based AIR applications.

How to Update Flash CS4 to Use the AIR 2 Beta SDK

If you use Flash CS4 Professional to build Adobe AIR applications, please follow the instructions below to manually update the version of the AIR SDK to use version 2.0.

  1. Update Flash CS4 Professional to version 10.0.2 at http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html or select "Help > Updates... " from within Flash CS4.
  2. Quit Flash CS4 Professional if it is open.
  3. Navigate to the Flash CS4 installation folder. The default location on Windows is "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS4\" and on Mac OS "/Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/"
  4. Within the "Adobe Flash CS4" folder you should see a folder called "AIK1.5". If this folder is not present repeat step #1.
  5. Rename the folder "AIK1.5" to "AIK1.5 OLD" or delete it if you do not need to save a copy of it.
  6. Make a new folder called "AIK1.5"
  7. Download the Adobe AIR 2 SDK from the labs website and uncompress the contents of the folder to the new "AIK1.5" folder you just created.
  8. Copy the "airglobal.swc" file located within the "Adobe Flash CS4/AIK1.5/frameworks/libs/air/" folder into the "Adobe Flash CS4/Common/Configuration/ActionScript 3.0/AIR1.5/" folder.

Flash CS4 is now configured to use the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK.

In order to take advantage of the new AIR 2 beta 2 features, you will need to update your application descriptor file to use the "2.0beta2" namespace.

How to overlay the Adobe AIR SDK for use with the Flex SDK

  1. Copy the contents an existing Flex SDK folder to a new folder. For example, in Flex Builder, copy the following folder located at:
    • Windows: c:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.2.0
    • Mac OS: /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.2.0
  2. Download the appropriate AIR SDK file for your operating system and save it to the root folder of the Flex SDK.
    • Windows: AIR20_win_sdk_XXXXXX.zip
    • Mac OS: AIR20_mac_sdk_XXXXXX.tbz2
  3. Extract the contents of the AIR SDK archive and overwrite the existing SDK files in the copied folder.
    • Windows: Right-click on the ZIP file and select "Extract All" or use the decompression tool of your choice.
    • Mac OS: In Terminal, cd to the root folder of the Flex SDK and run this command:
    • tar jxvf AIR20_mac_sdk_XXXXXX.tbz2
    If you have trouble overwriting files due to file permissions, try this command
    sudo tar jxvf AIR20_mac_sdk_XXXXXX.tbz2
  4. In Flex or Flash Builder, open the Properties dialog and choose the Flex Compiler page
  5. Click the Configure Flex SDKs... link
  6. Add the combined Flex and AIR 2 SDK folder created above
  7. Use this SDK for any projects accessing AIR 2 APIs.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR MAC USERS: Currently there is an issue that may cause your AIR application to crash on the Mac if you do not remove three older resources files that are still included in Flex Builder. To remove these files:

  1. In the Mac Finder, locate your "Adobe Flex Builder 3" applications folder and navigate to "/sdks/3.2.0/runtimes/air/mac/Adobe AIR.framework/Versions/1.0/Resources".
  2. Remove the following files: MainMenu.nib, AuthDialog.nib, and FlashPromptDialog.nib.


Known Issues

Submitting Bugs & Feature Requests

To submit bugs, please post describing the issue on the Adobe AIR 2 Beta Labs forum: http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/air2/.

To submit feature requests, please send our team an email by completing the following form: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish/ .

Legal Notices

Third Party Code Information available at http://www.adobe.com/go/thirdparty/.

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