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Important Notes on Using the AIR Badge Installation

Posted by David Tucker in AIRJan 25th, 2008 | 9 responses

I just had a few emails from someone who was implementing the install badge on a site. The problem he was having was twofold.

First, the application was not launching after installation (even if the launch application button was checked). This made the installation process a bit confusing for the end-user. This leads to my first important point: You must have allowBrowserInvocation set to true in your application descriptor file for the install badge to be able to launch your application after installation (as in Code Example 1).

PLAIN TEXT
XML:
  1. <!-- Whether the application can be launched when the user clicks a link in a web browser.
  2. Optional. Default false. -->
  3. <allowBrowserInvocation>true</allowBrowserInvocation>

Code Example 1 - Enabling Browser Invocation in the Application Descriptor File

The second problem was that the install badge would fail if it needed to install AIR. If the end-user already had AIR installed, it worked fine. This brings up another important point. The AIR installation will fail if your stage is not big enough for the AIR Installer dialog box (see Figure 1). If you keep the default values (width: 217, height: 180) as the minimum, you should not have any problems. I will probably update my InstallBadge.js file to set these as minimum values sometime this week (you can read more about the InstallBadge.js file and how to use the install badge here).

AIR Installer Dialog

Figure 1 - AIR Install Dialog

Reference
Deploying Adobe AIR applications seamlessly with the badge install feature
Launching an Application from the Browser

9 Responses to “Important Notes on Using the AIR Badge Installation”

  1. Joshua Rodgers says:
    January 25, 2008 at 8:29 am

    Good info to know, I recently added the installer badge following your examples and it was really easy. I had to modify the html page because I was using it as an include file in my blog so I had to adjust the paths and take out the body/header tags simply because I didnt need them. Thanks again for putting those post out there, they helped me a ton!

    http://justjoshn.com/extras/examples/contact-manager-air-example

  2. David Tucker says:
    January 25, 2008 at 11:22 am

    Great! I am glad that it helped out.

  3. Arby says:
    May 1, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    I’m annoyed that your instruction PDF says source files are in the SRC directory and what do I find? No FLA files.

  4. David Tucker says:
    May 1, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    @Arby – The source for the install badge is in the Adobe AIR SDK – not in my exercise files. You can download the Adobe AIR SDK here:

    http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/

  5. ram says:
    July 10, 2009 at 3:18 am

    Hi David – I followed your excellent article “Deploying Adobe AIR applications seamlessly…” and used the attached samples. The problem I have is that the install badge appears in a separate HTML page. My website is a Flash AS2 site. I have a download button which uses getURL() function which kicks in the customised AIR install html code. Question: how do I get the badge install dialog box to appear on the same Flash page? Many thanks.

  6. Novian says:
    September 29, 2009 at 12:38 pm

    Hi David,

    I appreciate your tutorial. I am however running into a problem – a problem others seem to have run into as well. If I don’t have the AIR runtime installed, and I click on a “install now” button, I get the following error:

    “Something went wrong trying to install this application. Please install the latest version of Adobe AIR from http://www.adobe.com/go/getair and then try again.”

    Any ideas as to why I would get this error? Note: I get this on all seamless badge installs, not just the ones in your examples.

    Thanks.

  7. Novian says:
    September 29, 2009 at 3:15 pm

    A follow-up to my previous post:

    It appears the issue had to do with the fact that I hadn’t successfully uninstalled the AIR runtime. I did uninstall the AIR runtime however I forgot to uninstall a couple of AIR apps. Once I removed these apps, I didn’t encounter the error message.

    Again, thank you for sharing your knowledge, David.

  8. Hilton Pippitt says:
    February 22, 2010 at 8:27 pm

    Wow, truly great info. Your blog is really awesome. I bookmarked it and will come back again.

  9. Jo says:
    February 15, 2011 at 4:20 am

    Tt seems that the air install badge doesn’t work 100% (many cases when after pressing the button several times the download isn’t triggered or errors occur) and thus had to offer a direct download version.
    Have a look at http://www.getwebreader.com/2011/02/a-better-custom-air-install-badge-google-analytics/ for a different implementation