NOTE: This article was written with AIR 1.5 in mind. I can’t say if the following information will work as intended on AIR 2. If you already know how to build you own Adobe AIR badge, you won’t find much new information here. This post is more to inform users that you can in fact create your own AIR badge if you didn’t already know. When I first started working with AIR, I learned about the badge but as far as I was concerned, the badge was a black box who’s functionality was designed to remain mysterious. The badge I used was the one Grant Skinner created and you can get more information from Adobe on how to use it. For a long time this badge worked well but finally the time has come where I need to make it behave a bit differently so I decided to do a bit of research.
After doing a few Google searches, I found a link to Adobe’s site with all the technical information on how to create your own AIR badge! I was completely surprised that I never even thought about the possibility that I could write my own badge… not sure what I was thinking. Nothing is more fun that reinventing the wheel right? After looking at the specifications, I realized it wasn’t too bad and started to plan out a logical flow on how my badge was supposed to work.
Requirements
My current badge has the following issue: a user installs my app through the badge, every time after that point that the user comes back to the badge, they have to ‘install’ the app again even thought it was already installed. Instead, I want the badge to sense if the application is installed and if so, launch it (I haven’t spend much time looking into Grants Badger app but I think it’ll let you do this as well if used correctly… I think). The logic for the new badge should be:
- Check if AIR is installed (If not, install)
- Check if my app is installed (If not install)
- Launch my app
Setup
I’ll be using Flash CS3 since that’s what I have available to me for this tutorial and I am making the assumption you already know how to use Flash, understand ActionScript 3, and have an AIR app to test. Open Flash and create a new AS3 file and save it in some folder. Now attach a class called ‘Badge’ to your file that extends MovieClip. Your class should look like the following:
package
{
import flash.display.MovieClip;
public class Badge extends MovieClip
{
public function Badge():void
{
trace('hi');
}
}
}
I added a trace in the constructor so I can make sure my class is working. When you test your badge you should see ‘hi’ in your output window. Now we are ready to continue. Continue reading “How to build an Adobe AIR Badge”