The game project we’re developing, Kingdom War, has now entered its final sprint. I’m heading back to Shenzhen at the end of July, and I hope to have it finished before then. Since I’ve been busy ...

This article gives us a bit of insider gossip about Flash CS5. There are a few typos in it, and for someone whose English isn’t up to much, like me, it was enough to bring tears to your eyes. A few things I paid attention to: Adoption rateLooking at the current state of the Flash platform, FlashPlayer10 installs are still climbing, and the new figures are expected to reach over 90% coverage in the near term. Flash CS5 featuresThe biggest news for developers is that Flash authoring is finally integrated with FlashBuilder. If you’re using Flash CS5, you can export a new FlashBuilder project through a new export dialog.

The inaugural issue of Tiandihui’s magazine Tiandizhi is out! Click to download the inaugural issue of Tiandizhi (2M) The book has a technical depth all its own and shares a lot of programming tips...

Quick Start Examples:Example 1. Reading XML var testXML:XML; var file:File = File.documentsDirectory.resolvePath(“Mousebomb/test.xml”); var fileStream:FileStream = new FileStream(); fileStream.open(file, FileMode.READ); testXML = XML(fileStream.readUTFBytes(fileStream.bytesAvailable)); fileStream.close(); The example uses the readUTFBytes() method to read the content and convert it into an XML object.

What is a File object? A File object is a pointer to a file or directory in the file system. For security reasons, it’s only available in AIR. What can a File object do? Get specific directories, including the user directory, the user documents directory, the directory from which the application was launched, and the application directory Copy files and directories Move files and directories Delete files and directories (or move them to the trash) List the files and directories in a given directory Create temporary files and folders Create directories Read file information Get file system information

AIR lets us build applications that work with the file system. Using the classes provided by the Adobe® AIR™ file system API, you can access the host’s file system — reading, managing, creating, and deleting directories and files, writing data to files, and more. I’ve broken working with the file system down into three parts of AIR file operations: AIR file basics (below) Using the File object to work with files and directories Using the FileStream object to read and write files Language reference for the relevant classes flash.filesystem.File flash.filesystem.FileStream flash.filesystem.FileMode

Today a guy in the FLEX group brought up AIR cache clearing, so I went wandering through the official docs again, and while I was at it I came across AIR’s URL schemes. Two of them I’d never used: app: and app-storage:. Here are the details: The standard URL schemes below are supported in any security sandbox in AIR: http: and https: — these two are of course web URLs. file: — this one is of course a local file URL. The schemes below are used by content running in the application security sandbox: app: Use this to specify a path relative to the top level of the application installation directory (that is, the application source directory) — the directory that contains the application descriptor file. For example, the one below points to the resources subdirectory under the application’s top-level directory: app:/resources

When you use httpService in Flex to read XML from a different domain (such as http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss), you get a Security error accessing url error. But in the debug folder (bin-debug by default) it reads just fine. This is really annoying — I’m sure plenty of people have been tripped up by this security issue. Why does it only work in the debug folder? It turns out the bin-debug folder works only because [系统盘]:Documents and Settings[用户名]Application DataMacromediaFlash Player#SecurityFlashPlayerTrustflexbuilder.cfg sets it as trusted automatically. At actual runtime, it’s blocked by security. In other words, what we need to do is solve the security-block problem. So how do we fix it?

For file association management, the flash.desktop.NativeApplication class in AIR provides 4 methods: isSetAsDefaultApplication(extension:String):Boolean returns whether the current AIR application is the default way to open the specified file format. The extension parameter is a file extension string — you don’t write the “.”, for example “flv”. The extension for the next 3 is the same. setAsDefaultApplication(extension:String):void associates the current application with a certain file format. removeAsDefaultApplication(extension:String):void removes the association between an AIR application and a file. getDefaultApplication(extension:String):String reports the path of the application associated with a certain file. Returns a string of the application path.

The AIR application descriptor file is an XML file that sets the basic properties of an AIR application. When developing with FLEX, it lives at “project folder/src/main file name-app.xml”; when developing with Flash CS3 it is also generated automatically when you create an AIR project, and you can edit it visually through the menu Commands > AIR - Application and Installer Settings, or edit the XML document by hand. The application descriptor file contains the properties of the AIR application and affects the whole application — its name, version, copyright, and so on. In theory, the application descriptor file can use any file name. When we create an empty file with Flash CS3 and use the default settings, the descriptor file is automatically renamed application.xml and placed in a special directory of the AIR project.