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Giorgio Natili

Giorgio Natili

www.mxml.it

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Exploring the original Flash application
  3. Adding desktop functionality
  4. Creating the AIR application file
Created:
25 Feb 2008
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
Adobe AIR

Sudoku on Adobe AIR: Migrating a Flash application to the desktop

The introduction of Adobe AIR opens many doors for developers who have been using technologies such as Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash, HTML, and JavaScript and now want to create desktop applications using languages that they are familiar with. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how easily and quickly existing browser-based Flash applications can be migrated to AIR. In fact, when you want to migrate an ActionScript 3.0 application that follows best practices, you don't need to modify the existing code at all—but you can update it to improve the desktop experience powered by AIR.

Note: The example used in this article is a browser-based Sudoku game originally created by Bob Sander-Cederlof. The game is written entirely in ActionScript 3 and can be played at: www.txbobsc.com/misc/sdk/. Bob graciously provided the source code so I could build the game on Adobe AIR. The source code is included here for reference. Figure 1 shows the original game and the AIR version.

Figure 1

Figure 1. The Sudoku application in the browser and on the desktop.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

Adobe AIR

Flash CS3 Professional

Adobe AIR Update for Flash CS3 Professional

Sample files:

Prerequisite knowledge

Basic knowledge of building Flash applications.

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About the author

Giorgio Natili is an Adobe Community Expert and W3C member. He heads his own company, GNStudio, which operated in the web development field for the past six years. His field of expertise focuses on Adobe Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Flash Media Server, and Flex, and their integration—as well as HTML and Flash accessibility. More recently his interests have broadened to include developing mobile applications and e-learning tools. He strongly believes in the need to spread new web technologies by evangelizing in the Italian developer communities. As a result, he has been an active member of the Igenium community (Macromedia Users Group), taking part as an invited speaker in the 2003, 2004, and 2005 webb.it events. In 2005 and 2006 he participated in SMAU in Milan, and he spoke at the Adobe MAX conferences in 2006 and 2007.

In 2003 Giorgio received the Sito Protagonista award from Macromedia Italy for the website alessandracellini.com. He developed the online version of the TV game show "Quiz Show" for Einstein Multimedia, subsequently published on the portal libero.it. He also implementated an RIA for visualizing Italian soccer championship results in real time for the principal Italian media group, Gruppo Espresso. In 2005 he founded the Flash community Actionscript.it, where he is currently the user group manager. In 2007 he developed Intelligere SCS, a web-based synchronous collaboration system developed entirely in Flex, and released it under an open-source license. His passion for community work continues with the founding of Flexdevelopers.org. Giorgio has the distinction of being the first person ever to get married at the Adobe MAX conference.