P&O AIR application

This is the first commercial AIR application I made, despite learning as much as I could about AIR several years ago when it came out.

The company I did it for, The Tin have made a number of commercail AIR apps, including a really cool animated FTP app.
This widget is part of a bigger project, which is a two phase site launch, dedicated to P&O's building of two new ships.

I found AIR really fun to use. It was easy to use and very powerful. One challenge I was tasked with was to make it check to see if there had been any updates. A quick search of the web lead me to see there are a handful of ways people do this, but they all required quite a bit of manual work, changing numbers in xml files, which is never a great method. I ended up using this brilliant class by Claus Wahlers from a Brazillian company called Côdeazur.

Essentailly as the .AIR installer file is a PKZIP archive the second file of which contains the version number. The class uses FZIP to stream in this file and then closes the stream, uncompresses it and reads the version number. Genius!