Recently a client called me and asked how he could get rid of the update dialog that suddenly kept popping up on the nice AIR video app running in his lobby. It only took a minute to find the answer, but I was really surprised by what I found.
You probably know the cumbersome Flash Player Settings Manager that you can only access on a special Macromedia page? I’d really like to know how many people think that they fell victim to a phishing attack when they see this Adobe page with a macromedia.com URL. But I know that Adobe is aware of this issue, so I’m not going to rant about it. At MAX 2008 Jim Corbett from the Flash Player team called the Settings Manager a “terrible experience” and said they are working on it.
But changing settings for AIR is an even worse experience: You have to download the AIR Settings Manager and install it as a separate application. All it does is switching automatic updates on/off by putting an empty file called updateDisabled in the AIR Application Data/Application Support folder.
Read More
Soundcloud API for Flash and Flex
I’ve just started working on an AS3-Wrapper for the Soundcloud-API. If you never heard of Soundcloud: It’s a very cool service for sharing audio files on the web. Something like Youtube for music, but with style. They already have API-wrappers for Ruby, Cocoa and Python and there are several great apps using these APIs, e.g. the excellent recording app FiRe for the iPhone.
I build the ActionScript-API as the basis of an upcoming project called Scup. That’s a Soundcloud Uploader (hence the name) for the desktop which I’m going to build with AIR. But I’ll write about Scup later.
You can find the code of the API-Wrapper on github. I’ve uploaded a first version with just the basic features and will continue to commit updates during the next weeks. Let me know if you want to use this for your own Soundcloud app. I still accept feature requests ;) And of course, it’s open source. Drop me a note if you want to contribute!