The Space For App Developers

Today I published my Resicon application to Adobe InMarket. At the moment Adobe InMarket is just a front end for online application stores like Adobe Marketplace or Intel AppUp. It’s goal is to make distribution and monetization of AIR based applications as simple as possible. Adobe is also working to integrate it with other online application stores as well.

The process of publishing my application was really straightforward. The first thing I had to do was to sign up to the InMarket service with my Adobe ID. Next I applied for the free code signing certificate (this is a really great promotional offer from Adobe because you get a trusted certificate completely for free). To get myself validated I had to fill in a form and have it faxed to the US phone number with my signature on it and a scan of my personal ID. I know it can be tricky to find the fax machine these days, but hey it is worth the effort .

After I got the certificate I was ready to do some additional steps on my application side. It only required me to copy and paste few lines of code that enable the LicenseManager API that comes with the InMarket SDK and its licensing.swc. In addition to the distribution and licensing, InMarket also provides the functionality for application updates. To enable it I only had to create a config folder with an updateConfig.xml file in my application directory structure. The updateConfig.xml is exactly the same file as you would use for standard AIR Update Framework.

Once all of the above steps were done I was ready to compile and sign my application. Next using InMarket portal I uploaded my *.air file and provided additional information like: an application description, screenshots, a and 495×250 px promotional image that will be displayed in the Adobe Marketplace.

After that done I was able to publish Resicon targeting both Adobe Markeplace and Intel AppUp stores with just a single click from a single place!

In my case the application is free but still I find it worth publishing it via InMarket since hopefully I will get wider distribution, place for hosting my application binaries and also nice reports with downloads stats etc. Those of you that will publish paid applications you can also see reports with numbers of: Trails, Purchases, Revenue, Activations and Trial to Purchase Histogram.

Really great resource with more in-depth information about InMarket is this wiki. You can also find links to the InMarket video tutorials on this page.

Today I recorded a screencast of a Toaster Lite tour; it quickly demonstrates how the application works and how to use it.

My little pet project called Toaster Lite has finally reached the point at which I can share it with the world. In its current state it is just a simple HTTP/AMF monitoring tool that lets you introspect your client-server traffic when doing your Flash/Flex development.

You may wonder why I built it. Well first of all I thought that it would be a cool example of what you can do with the ServerSocket API that came with AIR 2. Secondly I wanted to get better understanding of AMF (Action Message Format) structure. And, last and not least I have further plans for it and what I would like to achieve at some stage is functionality similar to soapUI but for AMF. (BTW: did you know that soapUI has some basic support for AMF but obviously not enough for me )

So what I’m planning for the next release is the ability to create test suites and test cases based on monitored requests and being able to replay these accordingly. At some point I would like to be able to perform load/stress testing of AMF services with it. I know this is something that would require threading support but maybe the Flash Player team will solve this somehow. If not, I may endup using Java to do this part of the job and integrate it with the UI using Flerry.

When building Toaster I managed to extract part of it into a separate as3 library called amf-message-deserializer, which can deserialize AMF requests received through the ServerSocket. The library project is available here in GitHub. I want to credit my fellow evangelist James Ward for his JSAMF project, which was a great help and a starting point. Other good resources to really understand AMF0 and AMF3 are their open specs available through this site.

To install Toaster Lite just use the badge below:

UPDATED 2011.01.13 – recorded a screencast with Toaster Lite tour:

Last night when I was working on my pet project (very soon to be released ) I finally got annoyed enough to take 15 minutes off to create this simple utility tool called Resicon. It is an icon batch resizing utility application. It allows you to resize icon images into a predefined set of sizes like: 16×16, 32×32, 36×36, 48×48, 72×72 and 128×128 or use a custom one.

This is a very handy tool because whenever you build an AIR application either a desktop or a mobile one you have to specify a set of its icons in different sizes. Usually this is done by downscaling a single high resolution image to the required sizes. This repetitive task is really annoying and that is why Resicon was brought to life.

Below is an install badge for the Resicon application, the source code is available in GitHub here.