The FlashChemist!

AMF Explorer is an  AMF data viewer which can be used to view the deserialized AMF requests and responses. The addon lets you see the requests and responses in the ‘Net’ panel of Firebug. You need to have Firebug addon installed in your Firefox.

Here are the URLs.

Addon Page

Home Page

This lets you see the AMF data as you used to (I used to) see using the Charles HTTP proxy application. Charles is not free and the evaluation version shuts down in every 10 minutes or so. Give it a try. Its still version 0.6 so more features may be pending.

Update: Few screen shots.

While this is an ideal choice of making AIR desktop applications for those who does not want the Flex framework, I am still surprised that Adobe didn’t add this option to its new IDE product, Flash Builder 4.0. Flex/Flash Builder being the best AS 3.0 editor so far, this option is really missing.

There is a bug in the Adobe JIRA – https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-9303 . But honestly, this looks like a natural choice for Adobe (!?)

I was using a hack for making this work with Flex Builder 3.0 and same works for Flash Builder 4.0. Its is a simple method though:

In the Flex/Flash Builder IDE, select ‘New >> Project’ and select ‘Flex Project’ option.

From the Wizard, please select ‘Desktop Application (Runs on AIR)’, give a project name and click ‘Next’ button instead of your usual ‘Finish’ button.

The next screen prompts for defining the folder for debug. Leave it as is, unless you want to, and click on ‘Next’ button.

The next screen is where you have to do some magic. Here it is.

Change the file extension of ‘Main Application file’ from .mxml to .as — nothing else.

Now click your favourite ‘Finish’ button, and you are set. But, if you run your project, it doesnt show up; this is because the visibilty option of your native window is set to ‘false’ by default. So, open up your application XML file (That will be in the root and named ProjectName-app.xml), and uncomment the sub node of the node and set it to true. Here is how it will look like:

Now, you have your AS3 AIR project, and you have access to all the AIR API’s, and your ’stage’ attribute will have the AIR related properties.

Workaround, still works nice. Adobe, we need this option from the wizard.

Here is an interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch at the Web 2.0 expo. Few of his comments goes like this

‘We will try to make the best HTML 5 tool in the world’

‘We don’t want to play technology game when Apple is playing Legal game’  about Apple coming up with SDK Licene 3.3.1

‘With Flash CS5 iPhone exporter, we proved that we can make same application work on multiple platforms, and Apple didn’t like it’

Watch it here.

See this awesome demo of a multi touch social media visualization for Pespsico, done with Flash Player 10.1’s new multi touch capabilities.