I’m sure you know by now that the Flash Platform is a great choice for making great front end applications to databases, or web services.  However, did you know with the release of AIR2 you can now use Flash or Flex to make gui front ends for existing programs or processes on your machine?  That’s right, AIR2 brings us a new feature called NativeProcess which let’s you communicate with existing programs or processes running on your machine.

See Christian Cantrell’s blog for the rest of the AIR2 new feature list.

I really enjoy building small apps for myself that are either fun or help with workflow.  Recently I was on an HTML5 project that required me to upgrade all my browsers to the absolute latest versions.  Well when I upgraded Firefox to 3.6, I could no longer use my Flash Tracer add-on, which caused a big workflow issue with my current Flex project.  While I know there are plenty of debug alternatives to Flash Tracer, I thought this would be a perfect chance to take AIR2′s NativeProcess out for a spin.  It also gave me a simple demo app for my talk at 360Flex about AIR.

So here’s what the simple logger app looks like.

Now that you’ve been blown away by my design skills, let’s walk through what, how, and where to get this app.

WHAT

AIR2, cross platform ( mac, win ), flashlog.txt reader.

HOW

Cross Platform – to take advantage of NativeProcess, your application must be installed as a native installer.  After you build your application, when you export the release build you select native installer instead of .air file.  When building AIR apps that you want to export as a native installer, you must build your application on the correct platform.  That is, I can’t build the .exe of this application on OS X, only the .dmg installer.

FlashBuilder option for native installer is in export release dialog

Since this app is so small I had no problem storing the OS X and Windows specific code in the same place.  When the app is run I use flash.system.Capabilities.os to determine Windows or MAC.  I know the path to flashlog.txt is now hard coded into Flash Player, but I still have to build the platform appropriate path to flashlog.txt.

MAC - /Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt

WIN - C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt

To grab the current username I parsed the results of File.userDirectory.url.  The last piece to setup is the path to the executable used by NativeProcess.  On OS X I’m using tail, which lives at /usr/bin/tail.  For Windows7, Powershell should live at C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe.

TIP : On OS X, you can use the “which” command to locate a program ( EX : which tail ).  On Windows, use the “where” command to locate a program ( EX : where powershell.exe ).  You will want to know this if the paths in this app doesn’t work for you.

Read flashlog.txt – to read flashlog.txt on OS X I’m using NativeProcess + tail.  On windows I’m using NativeProcess + Powershell’s Get-Content cmdlet.  Now that we know platform and paths, it’s time to setup our NativeProcessStartupInfo which will contain the executable we’re going to use, plus any required arguments.  In order to setup your NativeProcessStartupInfo object, you will need to know how to use the nativeprocess via command line first.  Using OS X’s tail as the sample, you can read the contents of flashlog.txt by running this in Terminal.

tail -f /Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt

I can run tail in Terminal, or in an AIR application using NativeProcess

Here is the equivalent AS3 setup for running the same command via NativeProcess.  The executable is set to a File which points at tail.  The arguments required by tail are stored in a Vector<String>.

var nativeProcessStartupInfo:NativeProcessStartupInfo = new NativeProcessStartupInfo();
nativeProcessStartupInfo.executable = new File("/usr/bin/tail");

var processArgs:Vector.<String> processArgs = new Vector.<String>();
processArgs.push("-f");
processArgs.push( "/Users/"+user+"/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt" );

nativeProcessStartupInfo.arguments = processArgs;

Now that the startup info is set, it’s time to setup our NativeProcess listeners, then start the process.

var process:NativeProcess = new NativeProcess();

// add listeners
process.addEventListener(NativeProcessExitEvent.EXIT, onNativeProcessExit );
process.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.STANDARD_OUTPUT_DATA, onStandardOutput );
process.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.STANDARD_INPUT_PROGRESS, onStandardInput );
process.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.STANDARD_ERROR_IO_ERROR, onIOError );
process.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError );

process.start(nativeProcessStartupInfo);

And that’s all there is to it, the important bits of reading flashlog.txt using AIR2′s NativeProcess.  NativeProcess has me excited because it opens a whole new world of apps that can be built.

I wrote this app for personal use and my 360Flex talk.  If you have interest in seeing more AIR2 samples, have a look at http://www.delicious.com/ericfickes/360FlexDCLinks+air2.  I put together a bunch of links supporting my talk on HTML and AIR which should keep you busy for a while.

WHERE

Click me to download the full source AIR2BUGGER

OS X DMG INSTALLER

WINDOWS EXE INSTALLER

In case you missed the June RMAUG meeting, my band The Compilers played our first hybrid concert and presentation show. Who are The Compilers? As far as I know, we’re Denver CO’s only Tech Funk Fusion trio that use internet technology along with analog instruments. By day we’re internet programmers, and by night we’re rockers. Right now majority of our software revolves around the Flash Platform, so it was only natural that we play at RMAUG.

Below is a recap of our setlist, and notes about the technology we presented on. When you see mentions of a Flash movie, these are not run as standalone SWF files. They are actually played by our Flex based Compilers Live Player. This application runs on our guitarist Jun Heider’s laptop, and the entire app is controlled over MIDI, via a Behringer FCB1010 Foot Controller, MMJ, and MERAPI.

Intro Song

For the first song of our set we decided to use a funny and informative Flash movie to give the audience a hint at what they’re about to see. For the June RMAUG show, this movie was updated to include spoken thank you slides for the companies that make our technology, and special shout outs to all the people who help us put on a great show.

Watch Flash Intro Movie

I want an iPhone

Watch Flash iPhone Movie

Tweet Jam v2

James vs. Rick

The Flash Platform Rocks!

The Compilers Next Show

1. Take picture in Photo Booth, or directly from Adium’s ImagePicker
2. Click spiral effect button, then choose the Color Invert filter
3. Click Set to apply filter
4. Click your buddy icon, click Choose Icon
5. Repeat steps 2 – 4 and apply the filters False Color, then Concert
6. Voila – your buddy icon is red hot!

Typically I’ll take my photos using Photo Booth so I can keep the original, and sometimes I may even use that picture for my dailymugshot.  When you walk through these filters, you’ll notice some filters won’t work as well for some photos, so play around with what you use.  Sometimes I’ll replace Color Invert with X-Ray, or Concert with Gamma Adjust.  It all depends on the picture I choose for a buddy icon.  Sometimes I’ll just keep layering until I create some crazy looking buddy icon, go crazy!

Here’s a photo step by step so you can see the final product.

1.The Original

2.Color Invert

3.False Color

4.Concert

I did some Googling and found mention about opening some UDP ports, but my TCP/IP settings currently has all ports open, so that didn’t help.  Then just for giggles I decided to turn off simple file sharing.  That fixed it!

So if you receive the message “A volume failed to mount”, and then another one with “Error code -6602″ in it, you should check your PC’s file sharing settings.  You would do this by following these steps.

How to disable simple file sharing on XP

1. Open Windows Explorer ( Win+E  or  double click My Computer )
2. Click Tools > Folder Options
3. Click the View Tab
4. Scroll down to the bottom, and uncheck “Use simple file sharing (Recommended)”
5. Then retry mounting the share on OSX

	[compc] Error: Java heap space
	[compc] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space	

This error was a real pain in the arse. I found a lot of people having similar issues and they all fixed this problem by setting ANT_OPTS as an environment variable to increase the memory size. This didn’t work for me. I set ANT_OPTS in my .profile, as well as in .MacOSX/environment.plist.  No luck.  I never figured out why the environment variable route didn’t work, but I was able to fix this error within Eclipse.

If you run into this error while running Ant build scripts, try the following steps.

1. Run Menu > External Tools > Open External Tools Dialog…
2. Select your Ant build file on the left
3. Click the JRE tab on the right
4. Enter “-Xmx640m” in the VM arguments field ( without quotes )
5. Click Apply, then Run

Flex JRE preferences

Hopefully this will get you going.

Adium X – OSX Multi server chat client – www.adiumx.com

AppZapper – OSX Uninstaller – www.appzapper.com

BBEdit – OSX Text editor and more – www.barebones.com

Dreamweaver CS3 – www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

Flash CS3 – *Don’t even bother with flash 8 on OSX – www.adobe.com/products/flash/

Photoshop CS3 – www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

Guiffy – OSX Diff Tool – www.guiffy.com

MacParDeluxe – OSX Binary group util – www.xs4all.nl/~gp/MacPAR_deLuxe/

Parallels – OSX Virtual PC – www.parallels.com

Quinn – OSX Tetris clone – simonhaertel.de/quinn

SmartSVN – OSX SVN GUI Client – www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/

Soap Client – OSX SOAP Development tool – http://scan.dalo.us/

Speed Download – OSX Download Manager – www.yazsoft.com

Split And Concat – OSX Binary group utility – www.xs4all.nl/~loekjehe/Split&Concat/

Synergy – OSX iTunes controller – wincent.com/a/products/synergy-classic/

Toast Titanium – OSX DVD / CD Burning App – www.roxio.com

Transmission – OSX BitTorrent client – http://transmission.m0k.org/

Transmit – OSX FTP Client – www.panic.com/transmit/

VLC Player – Great OSX video player – www.videolan.org/vlc/

What Size – OSX Disk utility – www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

Witch – OSX Alt Tab utility – www.manytricks.com/witch/