If you want to update the Adobe AIR runtime manually you have to disable the auto-update capability. Using the AIR SettingsManager you can disable it.
AIR SettingsManager is a small application that use a toggle button to Enable or Disable auto-updates as desired.

Download AIR SettingsManager application.

I’m very happy to spread the word for this news. Guys behind i2 technologia (Felipe and Luciano) were featured on Forum Nokia as a FN Success Story:

Testing Flex and AJAX applications is challenging because the nature of the application itself can communicate between the client and the server in a different ways. We’re not anymore in a context where the standard web application submits via GET or POST requests with an easy-to-understand format.
Flex 3 for example supports Mercury QuickTest Professional that allows developers to create applications that are tested by Quality Control (QC) professionals.

Now we have a new tool. In fact, Borland released then new Borland Silk 2008, an automated testing tool for Flex and AJAX applications

I’m a Nokia N95 8GB (with Flash Lite 3 installed) owner since November 2007 and I’m totally satisfied. When the Nokia N95 8GB software version 15.0.015 was released, the Flash Lite 3 support was added (other improvements include WLAN and browser stability, email viewing and Nokia Maps startup) and a lot of N95 Flash Lite (and non flash lite) applications come out. Moreover thanks to the WiFi support you can watch YouTube videos, write email and browse the web.

Just to let you know that Hydra, the bitmap effect scripting language, will be renamed to Pixel Bender. Reading the Kevin Goldsmith blog this is the reason :

The problem is that it’s a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn’t want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender ™.

During NetBeans Day at JavaOne it has been announced that NetBeans 6.1 IDE will be more oriented to AJAX and Web 2.0 application development. In fact the new NetBeans will add the support for PHP scripting language, support for embedded CSS, HTML and JavaScript technologies.

Multi-Mania is totally free event dedicated to multimedia topics that happen in Belgium. The speaker list has been published on the site and it keeps getting great.

Raffaele, my business partner, has published the slides of his presentation at 360Flex. The topic was very interesting because he showed the benefits achieved as a consequence of adopting Flex to re-design an enterprise application. The benefit was measured in terms of the time saved to execute an ordinary operation (cashing a check) by using the Flex re-designed application respect the time that was formerly necessary to execute the same operation by using a “common” Oracle form-based application (simple html using the “traditional” logic of 1 click=1 page).

The garbage collector of actionscript 3 works in 2 different ways to know which object should be deleted from memory: the reference counting method and the mark&sweep.

Emanuele, one of our senior developer at Comtaste, wrote an interesting article on our company’s blog about the Garbage Collector in Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3.

Working with Adobe AIR’s d ead and write methods, we encountered some strange behaviors when using the readUTF() method to read text files (TXT or RTF).
In fact if the text file we’re opening has not been created by Adobe AIR, we got a runtime error (number #2030 line ending ….) from the Flash Player. Investigating we discovered that the readUTF() method won’t find a couple of bytes embedded into the file that it needs.

These days I’m working a lot with Aptana IDE.
Aptana is an IDE based on Eclipse and the Studio version is free to use.
I’m using the enviroment to develop AJAX code for exporting in Adobe AIR. I have to say that I’m really impressed by it.

There are many ways you can use to control and optimize the performance of your Flex applications acting both on the server as well as on the client side. The first optimization you can implement is by reducing the time tha application takes to start.
Externalizing assets and searching for linker dependencies are simple approaches that can save the end user a lot of time in loading te Flex application.
It’s common for developers that at the end of a Flex application they are inadvertently linking in some classes that they never use.
I’ve found that another common error is to let the compiler to include classes that the application won’t use for its entire life. That’s a shame !
So an important step to check before compiling and deploying a Flex app is to check that you’re not including unused classes

Each time I tell that Flex 3 is open source, during my Flex 3 courses and sessions, people don’t believe it. So I copy the entire Flex 3 SDK libraries into a new Flex 3 project and show them the actionscript classes fo the SDK. Then I go ahead and tell that not only the standard Flex 3 SDK is open source, but also the charting controls, the AdvancedDataGrid classes and all the stuff that come with the Professional version of Flex Builder 3 are open source.

In order to open the data visualization source code we must have these two requirements

Today during a presentation about the use of Flex in enterprise scenarios, while I was illustrating the benefits of using the factory mechanism of BlazeDS to integrate it with Spring, a developer asked me why use Spring for Flex development (I guess he does not come from the Java world).
I think that the answer could be obvious to most of you but I want to share my thoughts with you about that topic.

The Adobe AIR 1 for JavaScript Developer pockek guide has been updated to Adobe AIR 1.0 and it’s ready to donwload.