Comments on: 4 “WTF?!” moments during a Flex/AIR experiment

By: Jonas

Jonas — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:40:18 +0000

I lol’d @ the video. Great blog, great articles!

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:28:58 +0000

Hey Ronny,

It would be nice if it could upload the file to an FTP server too!
(well not at maximum speed lol)

greetz

Ian

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:42:56 +0000

Nice post Ronny, these moments are what make Flash/Flex/AIR development fun

Those platform specific properties in AIR are usually just there for convenience so if you need to write an XML file out or show the path to the user it is in the typical format for that OS, like you used as an example: /Users/noCreativity/Documents/myFile.jpg for a Mac user

All APIs should have cross platform properties available, and in some cases you can also access the OS-specific values. The exceptions are the dock and system tray vs OS X menubar (not supported at the moment). I hope they change that in the next update to AIR.

Alchemy is incredibly powerful but it is quite hard to do — even for some really basic C code you need to write some hooks and go through at least half a dozen steps to get it compiled to a SWC. Hope to soon have the time to play around with it.

By: Frederik Jacques

Frederik Jacques — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:58:54 +0000

no, it’s just for compiling .c files

By: Ronny

Ronny — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:16:45 +0000

Ok, that looks pretty straight forward… But I guess we’re not compiling to Flash now? (Seen as there’s A LOT of stuff on the Alchemy Labs page one has to do before actually be up & running)

By: Frederik Jacques

Frederik Jacques — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:07:32 +0000

oh yeah and a good environment? xcode

By: Frederik Jacques

Frederik Jacques — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:07:14 +0000

Compiling a C file is very easy on osx.

put your c file in a folder (lets say /Desktop/test/mycfile.c)
open terminal and navigate to that folder
then just compile by this statement “cc -o myCompiled mycfile.c

cc = command to compile
-o = no ouput
myCompiled = the name of your executable
mycfile.c = the c file it has to compile

pretty simple isnt it

By: Ronny

Ronny — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:58:09 +0000

Thx, Jonas.
Are you running it on OSX or on Windows?
(A friend of mine tested it on Linux, and the webcam didn’t work at all)

By: Jonas De Smet

Jonas De Smet — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:49:45 +0000

Hi Ronny, while developing I had some of the same WTF’s like your. I don’t understand why some AIR Api’s aren’t that crossplatform like they should be… We can only hope they will find something for it

Cool app btw!