Alrighty Then!

I’ve been playing with Apollo/AIR for some time now and i really like it. But let’s go back in time: For years i managed to avoid first Macromedia Director (Lingo!!) and then Flash (framebased animation with almost no scripting). Then we had to finish 5 language versions of a Flash-projector (with around 100 screens) in 3 weeks, where the previous contractor had used 2 months for a framebased single-language version that did not completely work. You guessed right: I had to jump on the Flash6-train of actionscript-1. Hated it. With Flash7 i could move over to actionscript-2. Working with it was ok, but lacking documentation of base classes, erroneous components and the flash dev-environment made development a pain. But i didn’t find the time to have a closer look at FDT ( a eclipse plugin for flash) or the free as-2 compilers like MTASC. Then Adobe released Flex2 trial. I ported a as-1 project first to as-2, then decided to jump on flex. For someone working with Macromedia/Adobe tools for years, this was heaven. All that criticise flex-builder should be chained to a computer for at least 2 years with only flash 6 on it!

Back to AIR. Back to problems i found in Alpha and Beta 1:

Multiple Windows and Focus

AIRb1 doesn’t handle Mouse focus right. You have to click a window to transfer focus. Just moving the mouse leaves the focus somewhere in between.

HTML and Images crash runtime

Loading a image-url into the browser while displaying the same image in a loader crashes the runtime.

Update mechanism

You cannot programmatically access the version-number in the <appname>-app.xml . So you have to keep the version also in your code to determine if any newer versions are available.

TabNavigator

After removing all tabs and adding a new one, the new tab cannot be selected programmatically. Neither via selectedIndex, nor selectedChild.