I Was A Registered Alien!

AIR prototype: Gmail Notifier

I spoke at the Sydney Adobe AIR Camp on Tuesday and for my session built an AIR app that I now think I'll turn into a complete application.  It's currently for Mac only and runs on the Dock, it's icon only and when it launches you see a question mark overlayed on the envelope icon that I'm using. The app connects to your Gmail account and pulls back the quantity of unread mail, setting a new icon with an overlay of the quantity of unread messages. 

Control or right clicking on the icon will show a menu listing the 10 most recent unread messages, all menu items will click through to their respective messages.  I'd like to develop this further and add support for the system tray on Windows, but hey the original was only built over a weekend.

I've added an animated GIF below for you to see it in action, the red circle is only there to draw your attention to the icon, let me know what you think.  I'll be releasing the source code for this some time next week.

Authoring For AIR with Flex 3, New Adobe Article

With the recent relaunch of the Adobe Developer Connection for MAX, I'm proud to say that I've contributed an article to the new AIR Developer Center.  I created a Flickr image uploader in Flex and wrote about the application for the article - this is the second time that I've written about Flex and AIR for Adobe.

Desktop RSS with Adobe AIR

I've been writing for Builder AU again, creating a series of tutorials on authoring Adobe AIR with HTML & JavaScript (Ajax).  The first of these has just been published where we build a desktop RSS reader - the initial version is less than 40 lines of code in the application page! It's simple stuff so hang around and see how it evolves.

You can read more in the article, "Desktop RSS with Adobe AIR", from the following link: http://www.builderau.com.au/program/flash/soa/Desktop-RSS-with-Adobe-AIR/0,339028413,339281120,00.htm