I am busily working on an article about developing AIR for Android following the instructions from this excellent video tutorial by Lee Brimelow. However, when I connected my Nexus One and ran the ./adb devices command from the Console, it returned me an empty list of items. It turned out to be a very simple problem. I simply needed to enable USB debugging on my device. This setting was found at Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging on my Android phone. It seems that by default this setting is turned off (which makes sense really since few people really need it). Once I turned this on, running ./adb devices returned the connected device and I could continue developing and publishing to the device.

I recently wrote an article for the February edition of the Adobe Edge newsletter. This is a beginning tutorial covering creating desktop applications in Adobe AIR using HTML, JavaScript and jQuery. I focused on using tools built into Dreamweaver for this although I realize most of the readers of this blog probably use Eclipse-based tools. The audience for this article is intended to be front-end developers who already have HTML and JavaScript skills but with less emphasis on back-end coding (i.e. no ColdFusion in this one - rather I use existing API's). In this audience, I would think Dreamweaver is the dominant tool as opposed to Apatana, so I stuck with what would be comfortable for that group.

If you are looking for a introductory tutorial for building JavaScript-based AIR apps, please check out the article. It also includes some discussion of using the New York Times movie API as a means of highlighting that the Times makes a number of fantastic API's available for free. You can find the article here.

My latest article for the Adobe Edge newsletter went live today. The idea behind this one is that the simplicity of building applications in AIR makes it the perfect tool to build small applications intended to improve your own productivity. It covers some of the differences in approach that you may take when building an application with an audience of one (or few) rather than one for general consumption. I delve into an application I built for myself to help me write my weekly ColdFusion Open Source Update posts that uses the Google Notebook API. Unfortunately, Google announced that they were discontinuing development on Notebook shortly after the article was ready for "print" but the API still exists and they have said they will not be "end-of-life"-ing it in the near future, so the code is still applicable and the topic is still relevant. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the article here.

View the article here.

Flex Camp Miami is a little over a month away and we have an incredible lineup of speakers including some very well known names in the Flex and AIR community. This interview will be the first in a series of speaker interviews that will offer some detail about their session but also allow us the opportunity to dig deeper into each speakers specific interests and areas of expertise.

This week we have David Tucker from Universal Mind. David is the author of the recently released Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook and a regular contributor to InsideRIA, including their Weekly RIA RoundUp podcast. David also did the Lynda training series on "AIR for Flash Developers." David and I discuss his upcoming session at Flex Camp Miami as well as some reasons AIR is a compelling option for startups and some of our favorite AIR applications.

The Day two keynote starts out deafeningly loud. Tim Buntel, senior product manager for Flex Builder, is the first speaker to speak about the Flash Platform. He does a humorous secret agent theme to his presentation, where Ben Forta joins him onstage in a secret agent costume. They discuss almost the entire Adobe product line including Flex, Flash, AIR, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Flash Media Server, Flash Catalyst and more.