The First Post

It's always hard to know where to start with the first post on a brand new blog. Should you introduce yourself? Should you start with content right off? Do you explain your intentions with the blog or force people to read it to find out? All of which are decent questions.

So, now that we're on the same page, I suppose I'll answer them.

To start out, We are Robot Victory.

Who is "We"? Jordan Hess and Free Reyes.

We are web developers. Free is the designer and I (Jordan) am the programmer, although, we have a fair amount of crossover, but in general, those are the roles we fill.

We've worked together for several years now and felt it was time that we took a little more control over our lives, So, we started Robot Victory.

Our intention for this blog is to share some of the things we've learned and are continuing to learn, with the intention of helping other Web Designers/Programmers/Developers, increase their knowledge and improve their trade, as well as documenting some of the interesting things we find and are interested in so that we can easily find them later.

As far as content goes, You can check out our first real article, Getting Started with Adobe Air using HTML.

To finish off, Welcome to the Robot Victory Blog, and we hope you'll check back in for more updates about what we're working on, code examples, and possibly even some development libraries.

Making Adobe Air SDK Easier to Use by Adding it to your System PATH

In the Getting Started with Adobe Air using HTML article we showed you how to make a very simple Air test application by navigating to the Adobe Air SDK folder and running the Air test tool with the application.xml of your test project.

This is a great way to start out, however if you're going to be developing an Adobe Air Application, it is unrealistic to not take this one step further.

The next step is to add the Air SDK to your System's PATH variable, allowing you to execute your tests directly in the folder you're working from.

In Windows, you'll need to modify your PATH variable by Right Clicking My Computer and selecting Properties. In Windows 7 you'll need to select "Advanced system settings" in the window that pops up and from there, Select the Advanced tab then click the "Environment Variables" button.

Once in the Environment Variables window, you'll need to find the PATH or Path variable, select it, then click edit.

BE VERY CAREFUL not to delete anything from here, you want to add to it without removing anything.

The best way to do this is to go to the very beginning of the string and add the directory where your Air SDK is Stored, with a semi-colon on the end, like so:

C:\air-sdk\bin;

Once you've done this, simply select OK on the remaining windows and then open up your command prompt and change the directory to your project folder. Once in the directory you can execute the air app like so:

cd C:\workspace\TestAirApp
adl application.xml

If you're on a Mac or Linux it's quite a bit easier to modify your PATH. Simply open Terminal and run the command below, making sure to change the new path to where you stored the Air SDK. Then change to your project directory and run the application.xml.

export PATH=$PATH:/home/jdoe/air-sdk/bin
cd /home/jdoe/workspace/TestAirApp
adl application.xml

From this point on, all you need to do is change directory to your project and run adl application.xml.

Getting Started with Adobe Air using HTML

When starting with Adobe Air development in HTML/CSS/JS, it's hard to find examples of how to compile air apps through the command line utilities provided.

That being said, it is quite simple to make an air app, which is possibly one reason why nobody says it. All you really need is an "application.xml" file and an html file.

To start off, you'll need to download the Adobe Air SDK and install the Adobe Air Runtime.

Once you have Air installed and the SDK extracted to a directory on your computer, create a new directory and make two files, one called application.xml and another called test.html

The content for the XML File can be something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/2.5">
	<id>com.COMPANYNAME.PROJECTNAME</id>
	<filename>Project Name</filename>
	<name>Project Name</name>
	<versionNumber>0.1.1</versionNumber>
	<description/>
	<copyright/>
	<initialWindow>
		<!-- <content> needs to be the name of the HTML file you made -->
		<content>test.html</content>
		<title/>
		<systemChrome>standard</systemChrome>
		<transparent>false</transparent>
		<visible>true</visible>
		<minimizable>true</minimizable>
		<maximizable>true</maximizable>
		<resizable>true</resizable>
		<width>1024</width>
		<height>768</height>
		<x>200</x>
		<y>200</y>
		<minSize>800 600</minSize>
	</initialWindow>
</application>

And for your HTML File:

<html>
<head>
	<title>Project Name</title>
</head>
<body>
	<div id="content">
		<h1>New Project Name!</h1>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

At this point, you'll need to navigate to where you extracted your SDK via the command prompt (win) or terminal (mac/lin), you will also need the full path to your test project directory.

In Windows, For example,

cd C:\air-sdk\bin

./adl C:\workspace\TestAirApp\application.xml

And in Linux/OSX,

cd /home/jdoe/air-sdk/bin

./adl /home/jdoe/workspace/TestAirApp/application.xml

You will need to change the paths in those examples to match your paths to where you've stored the SDK and Your Test code, but other then that you will now have your first Air App in testing.

Download the example code.