As you have probably heard by now, the ECMAScript committee has decided to halt work on ECMAScript 4 in favor of an incremental updated to JavaScript (know as ECMAScript 3.1). Im not going to go into the details of what happened (you can find good discussions of it here, here and here), but I did want to make a quick post and discuss how this affects ActionScript 3. It doesn’t. ActionScript 3 is not going away, and we are not removing anything from it based on the recent decisions.

As I mentioned earlier, I am starting to build an XMPP chat client for the XMPP / Jabber community server I set up today. I am using the XIFF ActionScript 3 library. While the library seems to be pretty solid, there is not a ton of documentation for it right now. Here is a simple example that shows how to connect to an XMPP / Jabber server, join a room, and send a message to the room.

We have been discussing the need for an AIR specific version of the as3corelib library, which would contain useful APIs for working with Adobe AIR. However, instead of creating a new library, I have added an AIR package to as3corelib which will contain AIR specific APIs. Right now, there is only one class added, a FileTarget for the Flex Log framework, but I expect we will be adding more over time. If you have any suggestions, post them in the comments.

If you have been in the Flash community for a while, then you may remember a chat app that I worked on for Macromedia Central, named “Central Dev Chat”. This was a decent chat client, but the thing I liked about it the most, was that it provided an easy way for the community to hang out and chat about the Flash community and development.

I have posted a new build of Flump, which is an Adobe AIR based Flickr image downloader. There are AIR files for AIR 1.1 (Mac and Windows) and the Adobe AIR Linux Alpha. Biggest change in this version is that the app now supports Flickr account authorization, and also enforces image license restrictions when not authenticated. There are probably a few bugs in this release, so just post them here or on the Flump issue page. You can find more information as well as download it from here.

I just checked in some updates to the ActionScript 3 Flickr library. The biggest change is that I checked in a Flex control that will provide a UI and handle all of the communication to authorize an application with Flickr. There is no documentation on it, and as I have built it for projects I am using, there are probably some API gaps, but it seems to be pretty solid. Here is a simple example of how to use it: import com.adobe.webapis.flickr.authorization.events.AuthorizationEvent; import com.adobe.

I have just posted a video over at gotoandlearn.com that walks through how to get AIR applications running on Linux using the Adobe AIR for Linux Alpha.

I just uploaded a build of Flump (Flickr image downloader) that works with the Linux alpha of Adobe AIR. The issue was that the the Linux alpha is based on AIR 1.0, and I had packaged Flump as an AIR 1.1 app. You can find more information, as well as download Flump (and its sourcecode) from the Flump project page.

About a year ago, Lee Brimelow and I released a simple application named flump that would download all of the images from a flickr account. We made this so we could download all of the webcam images from the bus tour, and put together a time lapsed video (you can view some of that video here). The original version worked on the beta 1 release of Adobe AIR, and did not work on the release version. I have just uploaded a new version which works on AIR 1.

What are your biggest issues, bugs and annoyances with Adobe AIR? I am specifically looking for input on both developers bugs, and end user bugs. I am not looking for input on features you would like added (Ill do that in another post). We already have a pretty good idea of the main issues (based on the forums, bug reports, blogs, testing and twitter), but your comments here will be another useful data point. As usual, you can always submit the issues directly to the AIR team here.