Ripeworks

Dec 12 Using AIR 1.1 alongside AIR 1.5

If you are one of the lucky ones to have a copy of Flash CS4 Professional, and then decide, “AIR 1.5? Sweet! I’m going to upgrade!”, you just might kick yourself for doing that!

AIR 1.5 utilizes Flash Player 10, which is great for new features such as 3D capabilities and performance updates, but there are also many security drawback that Flash Player 10 brings to the table.

The particular drawback that almost made me pull my hair out, is that with AIR 1.5, you are no longer able to utilize drag-and-drop of files into your AIR application. I was almost ready to re-install Flash CS4, but I figured out an easy workaround so that you can use AIR 1.1 or AIR 1.5 for your projects.

(Please note that this is for Mac, if you are running Windows, this process may be different)

  1. In Finder, navigate to: /Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/Common/Configuration/Players/
  2. There, you will see a file named: AdobeAIR.xml
  3. Make a duplicate of that file, and rename it to: AdobeAIR1_1.xml
  4. Open up that file, and replace the text with this:
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    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <players>
        <player id="AdobeAIR1_1" version="9" asversion="3">
            <name>Adobe AIR 1.1</name>
            <publishobject2 id="FLAir1_1" version="1.1" intversion="1.1"></publishobject2>
            <path platform="WIN">FLAir1_1.dll</path>
            <path platform="MAC">FLAir1_1.bundle</path>
            <playerDefinitionPath as2="$(UserConfig)/Classes/FP9;$(UserConfig)/Classes/FP8;$(UserConfig)/Classes/FP7" as3="$(AppConfig)/ActionScript 3.0/AIR1.1/airglobal.swc" />
           
            <feature name="mobileDebug" supported="true" />
            <feature name="apolloPublish" supported="true" />
            <feature name="apolloTestMovie" supported="force"/>
            <feature name="apolloDebugMovie" supported="true"/>
            <feature name="apolloPackaging" supported="true"/>
            <feature name="publish_localPlaybackSecurity" supported="false" />
            <feature name="publish_hardwareAcceleration"    supported="true" />
          </player>
    </players>
  5. Save that file.
  6. Restart Flash if it is currently running.
  7. That’s it!

NOTE: If you have already built your AIR application using 1.5, you will need to edit your application.xml and change the xml namespace from “http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5″ to “http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.1″

Hopefully this will help anyone that also experiences limited functionality while using or upgrading to AIR 1.5

Happy drag-and-dropping!

Comments (2)

  1. Jesse on March 30, 2009 4:41 am

    Can you email me the CS4 adobe AIR 1.5.1 config file or post it here? Trying to do the same thing as you except the other way around, getting AIR 1.5.1 features in CS3.


  2. Mike on March 30, 2009 5:06 pm

    as far as I know, you need to have Flash CS4 to develop using Flash 10 or AIR 1.5+.

    Though, I’ve never tried to make a Flash 10 application using CS3.

    I can send you the config file just for the hell of it though.


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