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Two convenient ways to update your AIR applications

June 25, 2008

Our recent AIR application MiniTask has built-in support for application updates via the web. In the first version we used Claus Wahler’s AIR Remote Updater which is a really smart solution for update handling as it “grabs the version number directly from the remote .AIR file without having to download the entire file” (using FZip). It’s a “data only” class so you have to implement all UI logic yourself by listening for events and calling methods on the class.
A few days ago Adobe released its own update framework for AIR. The major difference compared to the AIR Remote Updater is that is uses an XML file to describe the update (version number, release notes…) and provides a default UI for all dialog boxes. We’ve just updated MiniTask to use that framework (an update for the updater ;) as it’s a good thing if there is going to be kind of a “standard” way for application updates. Both solutions work quite well, with the latter being more feature-rich and maybe faster to implement since the built-in default UI can save you a lot of time (if you use the standard AIR look).

Filed under: Flex/AS3

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