MINAIR: RUNNING PURE AS3 WITH ADL
[code] Adobe Flex SDK 3 / AS3, GPL
With the enthusiasm these days over awesome developments with HTML5, Processing, and the like, it may be an odd time to be working in Flash. The thing is, for interfaces in an installation setting, I would argue that Flash/AIR remains the simplest and best-looking platform for animating video and text along with interactive elements.
While I appreciate the intentions behind AIR, Im not interested in distributing applications. Instead, Im typically looking for a front end for an installation largely running in, likely, python. The AIR Debug Launcher (ADL) is a great tool for testing AIR apps, and increasingly Ive been (mis)using it in this kind of production environment as well. My workflow is 100% AS3, no FLAs here, and I use the Flex compiler, keeping things open source.
For projects that mix python code with AS3, I wanted a single directory that I could include in a project and invoke a Main class from a simple shell script. Additionally, I wanted a host of AS3 classes that Ive assembled over the years to be at the ready.
minair accomplishes this. As of yet, it’s a bit nascent, and some settings have to be altered manually between projects. But point this at your Flex SDK, and you have a minimal AIR framework running on ADL that’s ideal for an installation frontend.
Typically, I use a socket connection with a simple protocol to communicate between AIR and python, where I keep the bulk of the work (state, interfacing with hardware, databases, etc) — that is implemented in a Bridge class which is included in the framework. Additionally, we’ve got loaders, asset handlers, utils, display objects… Id love to document these, it wont happen, but I include them here nonetheless.
