One of the biggest hurdles I felt that I had to overcome to make AIR a viable alternative to the reigning SWF wrapper was installation. The Badge installer has been well documented and publicized but so far the side-car installer has received almost no attention. Ultimately, the ability to create a user-friendly installation process from CD/DVD without requiring internet connectivity is an absolute requirement for a large portion of our projects. On this page I will lay out the few and simple steps required to put together a Mac/PC CD/DVD with a one click runtime/app installers for both platform.

When the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) first came out I was immediately interested to see that what it would offer in the form of update management. Sure enough there was support for it to the point where you could initiate an installation of an update once it has been downloaded. That in itself I thought was a really good piece of functionality and I started to experiment with it immediately. But now, Adobe has offered an even greater update support with their Update Framework available on labs.

After having used MDM Zinc for a few years to create RIAs or “desktop flash applications" I was very excited to see an Adobe wrapper for the flash platform. I think Adobe has done a good job with it and an excellent job supporting it with various add-ons such as the update framework, the Badge installer and the lesser known Side Car installers (more on all these add-ons in my final two posts in this series). Right now I want to list a few things that I think can really help make a good AIR app that is easy to maintain as well.