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Luchner c01.tex V3 - 03/20/2008 2:29pm Page 16

Chapter 1: The Development Environment

To uninstall an AIR application on Windows, follow these steps:

1. Click Start ➪ Control Panel ➪ Add or Remove Programs.

2. Within the entry list, scroll to the AIR application you wish to uninstall and click once to

select it.

3. Click the Remove button. Doing so will remove the installation directory from Program Files

and remove the Desktop and Start Menu shortcuts you may have opted to create during the

installation process.

To uninstall an AIR application on a Mac, all you have to do is drag the installation folder to the Trash

and then empty the Trash.

Uninstalling the application removes the application directory and any ancillary ﬁles you opted to cre-

ate through the installation window. Uninstalling with these processes does not, however, remove the

application storage directory or any ﬁles created and associated with the application after installation.

Good-bye, Hello World! You are now armed with the tools and knowledge to start building and dis-

tributing AIR applications. You also have a structured development environment to make that process

run smoothly.

The next section addresses adding improvements to the development process by introducing an Apache

ANT build scheme and a simple debug panel available from the code examples for this chapter on the

accompanying website.

Extra Tools

Some developers are just too busy to type multiple options into a command line. To automate the

processes of deploying, debugging, and packaging discussed previously in this chapter, consider using

Apache ANT, a popular tool for that purpose and a perfect ﬁt for your build process, as it is

cross-platform and requires Java, which is already on your machine. If you are more comfortable using

another tool for automating the build process, you are encouraged to do so. However, if you are inter-

ested in setting up a build process through ANT, the following section will walk you through that

process.

You may also ﬁnd that running the Flash Debugger each time you launch an application to debug code

can present a time-consuming obstacle within your development. As such, the concept of a simple debug

panel that communicates to an AIR application using the

LocalConnection

class of the API is discussed.

The code for the simple debug panel and the ANT build ﬁle can be found in the code examples for this

chapter on the accompanying website.

ANT Build

A few chapters could easily be devoted to ANT alone, but in keeping with AIR application development,

this section provides a brief overview of ANT build markup and not necessarily the intricate workings

of the tool. Although this solution is presented to you for ease of development, this might not be your

cup of tea. Thus, all examples within this book have been run using the command-line tools described

previously in this chapter.