One of the holy grails of the "Build Once, Deploy Anywhere" promise of the Adobe AIR isn’t simply that your application will cross all major operating systems, but also that the same codebase can be deployed via the web as an RIA. Admittedly, there remain some differences in functionality; For instance, a desktop application has to worry about windows or contextual menus. Another challenge altogether is transferring data between a desktop and a web application, which can be a daunting task if you’re trying to share multiple files, yet is perhaps not as difficult as you might think.

I’ve finally gotten around to fully open source my various applications, factoring and debugging the code, commenting and applying all the necessary licenses and other miscellaneous logistical duties to get my two AIR applications up and out there.

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Practical Desktop

Practical Desktop appears to be a simple timekeeping application, though in reality it’s an open source widget framework that allows pretty much anyone to build a deployable block of functionality that can start interacting with other widgets. The wrapper’s there for you, go nuts. The source is here

From a personal perspective, I use it as a beta and explorative sandbox, because there are a lot of interesting things coming out in the near future that I’d like to offer some guidance on development best practice, and to do so I will have to figure it out myself first. Rest assured that the widgets I build will be functionally complete, though perhaps limited in feature support.

Pandora

The Pandora Desktop application is really just a customized webkit browser that’s hardwired to the Pandora mini player. I’ve fixed the application so minimization works in Windows, and expanded it to include the player’s html wrapper as well. The reason I did this is because Pandora’s a free service, and I’d like to make sure that I’m not ripping them off by stripping out the ads. Optimally I’d like to help them convert their existing player to AIR, but until I have free time (or they pay me ) that won’t happen.

So there I was, hacking away at AIR, and my iPod runs out of batteries. I was in that rare coding zen where you really need the audio to lock you out from the rest of the world, so I was fairly annoyed that the random conversation here at Apropos suddenly started to interfere with my productivity. No worries though, I could always resort to Pandora, right?

Now, I’m not a big fan of Pandora. Don’t get me wrong, I love what they’re doing and have found some phenomenal music there, but the fact that I always have to keep a browser window open to make use of their service has kindof annoyed me, and now was no different. I could deal with it though for the sake of productivity…. until I realized that AIR came with its own embedded WebKit browser.

One of the nicest features of AIR is the seamless install provided by the installer badge available from Adobe. Unfortunately, it takes a little digging to pull out exactly how it works, and I’m not someone who wants to rewrite things on a regular basis. Additionally, the seamless installer badge is build in Flash, something us hard-boiled Flex developers find hard to swallow.

The goal of this particular package is to provide a simple reusable component that handles all the seamless install features, and gives the developer skinning control over the entire component.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This control requires Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115 or later.