AIR Tip 10 – Disabling AIR Auto-Update for Kiosks and Display Applications
Posted by David Tucker in AIRMar 5th, 2008 | 6 responsesAIR Tip 10: This tip will show you how to disable the AIR auto-update for an application where you do not want the AIR update popup to be displayed.
We use a display application at Georgia Tech Savannah that runs on AIR. It is shown on televisions across campus. I had been a bit slow in upgrading to 1.0, because I was adding some additional functionality to the application. However, I quickly noticed that the AIR update dialog box kept popping up on these machines. In reality, this wasn’t a big deal for me, because it was an easy fix. With this application I would prefer to update AIR manually and not have the popup be displayed.
I recently came across an Adobe AIR Technote which gives a solution to this problem. Adobe has created an AIR application that allows you to turn the AIR auto-update functionality on or off (don’t confuse this with the update functionality for applications – this the update functionality for the AIR runtime itself).
Figure 1 – AIR Update Settings Application
This should only be done on machines that require it. One of the advantages of AIR is that Adobe can push out updates quickly when security issues arise. This setting now delegates that action to you, so you need to be sure and stay current with your application. This becomes extremely important when the client doesn’t know (or understand) the difference between your application and the runtime that it operates in. If there is a security error, they will see it as a problem with your application.
Reference
AIR Settings Application
Adobe Technote
6 Responses to “AIR Tip 10 – Disabling AIR Auto-Update for Kiosks and Display Applications”
About Me
David Tucker is a Rich Internet Application developer, author, and trainer. David currently serves as a Software Engineer at Universal Mind. In addition, David also blogs regularly at InsideRIA where he produces the Weekly RIA RoundUp podcast. David also recently completed the AIR 1.5 Cookbook (with a great group of co-authors) and the Lynda.com series, AIR for Flash Developers.
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Hi,
interesting stuff as usual, I just wandered if you might be able to tell more about developing a kiosk with AIR as it becomes the natural technology to be used in this kind of projects.
Thanks!
@Am – at the moment AIR does a fairly good job, but since it is not designed for Kiosk, it doesn’t have some of the core Kiosk functionality (such as disabling CTRL+ALT+DELETE). Director 11 will be released soon, and it will have much more fine-grained tools specifically designed for kiosks. However, if you aren’t as worried about the other issues, you can begin with the AIR Tip on fullscreen AIR applications:
http://www.davidtucker.net/2007/12/15/air-tip-2-going-fullscreen/
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The settings manager application does not seem to install behind a firewall. Why is this?
Sorry for reviving an old conversation, but we’d be interested to know your view on SWF Studio versus AIR to deploy kiosk application. Any update on security issues with AIR for kiosk app ?
I think that is an interesting point, it made me think a bit. Thanks for sparking my thinking cap. Sometimes I get so much in a rut that I just feel like a record.