Note to self (the Flex newbie): Test your HTML wrapper for your SWF files to make sure that the user experience is a good one when you’re setting up your Flex apps on your site! I took the HTML wrapper generated by Flex Builder and modified it to fit into my page. While doing so, I forgot to include the playerProductInstall.swf file with my app, so when a browser with an older Flash Player viewed the page, the JavaScript I had in place to call playerProductInstall.swf would hang since it couldn’t find it. The detection for when no Flash Player is present at all (or only a really old version) was also a bit ungraceful.

But I was clueless to these poor experiences since I hadn’t tested these scenarios. Fortunately, my app was just released, and only to a beta crowd.

To test the absence of Flash Player, you can download a Flash Player Uninstaller and uninstall Flash Player. I’m not sure what the best way is to install and test an old version of the Flash Player; I just had a virtual machine that had an old version on it, so I used that because it was convenient. If you google for “download flash player 8“, there are some non-Adobe links that appear to be valid links, but I did not try these.

Adobe has a Flash Player Detection and Installation support page that is helpful as well.

Tom Yager, writer of the Ahead of the Curve column in InfoWorld, wrote up a nice article about AIR entitled AIR gets rich apps right. Touting Adobe’s credentials through their past record, he indicated that Adobe is a great candidate for accomplishing what AIR is intended to do: Get that web technology to the desktop environment untethered from the web browser.

I’ve always loved Tom Yager and find his columns very interesting (although the Intel/AMD discussions lose my interest). It’s great to see him praising AIR.

I am fascinated to see the development that has been made in robotics to make robots fit either human or otherwise organic behavior. It is worth noting that it takes an exceptional amount of skill and engineering to simulate even the simplest intelligence or motor skills of living things; nevertheless, research and development has come a long way in recent years.

For instance, I had a very memorable experience when I saw a 20 minute presentation of ASIMO at Disneyland a couple years ago. ASIMO even has his own website. Naturally, seeing him online or in a video doesn’t have the same impact as seeing him in person.

Well, ASIMO is a pretty impressive humanoid robot, but BigDog is an amazing demonstration of a quadruped robot. The video on the BigDog webpage shows off how agile the robot can be. It’s amazing how natural its movement seems!

Props to Cali Lewis of GeekBrief fame for featuring this amazing robot.

The following are my notes during the Adobe AIR Local Data Storage Options webinar that was presented during Adobe Developer Week. It was presented by Greg Hamer and the slides and demo code are already online.

Before getting started, note how Microsoft and Adobe are taking two different approaches: Microsoft is trying to bring the .Net desktop development community to the web. Adobe is conversely trying to bring web developers to the desktop! (Kevin Lynch)

There are four main options for AIR local storage: Local Shared Objects, File System, Encrypted Local Store, and the embedded SQLite database. Shared Objects are available in the Flash Player as well; all of these options are obviously available in AIR. Note that the data size limitation for Shared Objects does not exist in the AIR runtime!

Performance considerations. Shared Objects read and write very quickly. File system access and encrypted local stores are typically be slow in writing. Embedded SQLite databases are typically the best combination of speed and random access of items. Greg highlighted the AIR_LocalStorage_Demo app created by Jason Williams that demonstrates the speeds of the four storage methods.

Local Shared Objects. You can serialize memory resident data structures. Great! However, it runs in synchronous mode.

Encrypted Local Store. Used to store sensitive data. The price is the slow write speeds.  Also runs in synchronous mode. All data is serialized using ByteArray.

File System. Obviously important for management of documents. Can run in sync and async mode. The File and FileStream objects work together to point to a file and read/write data. The File object helps remove you from the pain of dealing with Mac vs. Windows environments with properties like File.userDirectory, File.documents.Directory, File.desktopDirectory, etc. It also has methods for opening Open and Save dialog boxes native to the environment as well as copying/moving/deletion methods.

Embedded SQLite Database.  Nice thing about them is that they are self-contained in a single file and require no external software installation to begin using them (support is built into the AIR runtime). Even supports transactions. And the database supports large amounts of data: SQLite has a theoretical limit of over 2TB. Supports ANSI-SQL 92.

However, it’s not a full-blown enterprise database server, obviously. So you lose things like stored procedures, enforcing data type constraints, foreign key constraints, and primary keys must be integers. It also isn’t a multiuser environment.

Session evaluation. I am unhappy to say that I was disappointed with the session. It was high-level, the coverage of code samples (when they weren’t passed over completely) consisted of merely reading the code back to us. I recommend viewing the recording if you have zero knowledge of data storage in Flex and AIR, as it would serve as a decent first-baby-step introduction for you.