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AIR time

Christmas eve. Work was off to a slow start, hindered first by the office Wii, then by table football, and it was only 9.30am. While the rest of the company was at home winding down and preparing for Christmas, Craig & I decided to spend our last few hours on a side project, an Adobe AIR app. We’re the life and soul of Headscape, there’s no doubt.

Although I’d delved into the world of AIR before, I hadn’t really had a proper reason to create something. Our idea was simple, a site watcher. All it had to do was fire off requests to various sites and check the response code. Easy. We could build this with HTML and Javascript no problem. Throw in JQuery and you’re laughing.

The great thing about writing for AIr is that you’re coding for one rendering engine, and it’s webkit. This means writing webkit specific CSS rules completely guilt free. Rounded corners and RGBA can make your design pretty without many images. JQuery’s AJAX library is fantastic, it takes the pain out of requests and helps the code stay clean and readable. Within an hour we had a simple app running.

So we kept going. Using a plugin for JQuery the list became sortable, and the list of sites to watch was imported from an XML file. We created a private twitter account to keep a history of changes, and allow notifications via any standard twitter client. We also added a notification window so the app could be run in the background.

The experience was quite enjoyable, and relatively pain free. The only minor annoyances are having to develop CSS / JS without Firebug, but we managed. Aptana studio made for a competent IDE, and it’s code assistance is handy. Would definitely recommend giving it a whirl if you’re at all interested.

The AIR app is now available to download form Boagworld.com: Download site watcher AIR application

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Headscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “AIR time”

  1. Mark Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Where can we get our hands on this wondAIRful app? :)

  2. Chuck Monroe Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 8:49 pm

    Same here! I was expecting a preview of the app in question! I hope you can share the result…

  3. dave Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 9:30 pm

    Sorry, it’s not quite ready for showing off – just needs to be more customisable, at the moment it’s all setup for our sites & twitter feed, will tweet again when we’re ready :-)

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