Building Video Apps With Adobe AIR
Some of the most compelling applications on the web today are rich internet applications (RIAs) that include Adobe Flash Player-compatible video. These web experiences have transformed the way users expect to engage with rich content outside the browser as well.
Today, many web developers are looking to move rich content from the web to the desktop, enabling people to engage with content at their convenience online or offline. They're extending the reach, availability, and quality of RIAs while providing people new ways of accessing and experiencing content.
The advantages of better integrating video into desktop applications are numerous. For instance, corporate training efforts can benefit greatly from applications that deliver video to the desktop. With dispersed teams and people working in the field, companies find that employees, partners, and others are often not connected to the internet. But they still need ready access to training and safety applications. Adobe AIR—available in beta from Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com), with the 1.0 release planned for early 2008—enables developers to address this challenge.
With Adobe AIR, skilled and novice developers have the tools to move from creating web-only services to delivering video-rich desktop applications. As a powerful, easy-to-use, cross-operating system application runtime, AIR lets web designers and developers take RIAs created in HTML/CSS, Ajax, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Flex and quickly deliver them as desktop applications.
With regard to the training efforts highlighted above, organizations can provide employees with video-rich training applications in Adobe AIR that can be viewed and completed on laptops anytime, anyplace. When internet connections are available, test results can be captured automatically to backend systems and reports can be sent to supervisors. Of course, training applications are just one example. Easier integration of video into desktop applications provides new avenues to deliver branded entertainment services and customer service and transforms how individuals engage with each other.
Getting Started With Adobe AIR
This article walks through creating two applications built on Adobe AIR—one in Adobe Flash and the other in Adobe Flex. The application created in Flash provides a windowed desktop application that plays Flash Video (FLV) content.
Adobe is also preparing to release Flex 3, the latest version of the company’s popular integrated development environment (IDE). Flex 3 is a cross-platform, open source framework for creating rich internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems.
Similar to the application created with Adobe Flash, the Adobe AIR application developed in Adobe Flex launches a window to play FLV video content. Users can drag and drop any FLV file from the desktop or file storage system onto the application, and the video plays—something they couldn’t do in a web-based application. Because the beta version of Flex 3 does not yet contain a comprehensive set of video components for building video-enabled applications, the code for this application is provided within the instructional steps.
Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe Flash CS3 Professional support Adobe AIR, so people can create projects on AIR using either development tool. Developers can also customize application skins using Flash and Flex to create unique, highly branded video experiences for the desktop.
Although this article focuses on using Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex, developers can also create applications built on Adobe AIR in other development environments, such as Aptana, Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, or any text editor along with the command-line tools provided with the Adobe AIR SDK to package the application to AIR for distribution and installation on desktop machines.