Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Publish Your AIR Application

Once you've got your AIR project squared away, you'll want to test it, debug it, and ultimately distribute it to your audience, just like a Flash animation. In Flash-speak, that means you need to publish your project. The process for publishing an AIR project is slightly different from publishing a Flash animation. For one thing, as explained on Create a Code Signing Certificate, you need a code signing certificate. Usually, Flash animations consist of one or more SWF files and sometimes some HTML code to create a web page. On the other hand, AIR applications are distributed as a single .air file, which holds all the project's stuff. Your audience uses that .air file to install the program and all the necessary files on their computers. As part of that process, the installation routine checks to make sure the AIR runtime is on the local computer. If it isn't, your user is prompted to install it. The following steps show you how to publish your AIR project. (You can use your own project or the example from Convert a Flash Animation to AIR.)

1. With your AIR project open in Flash, choose File→Adobe AIR 2 Settings.

   The Application & Installer Settings window opens, displaying the General tab. Parts of the form are probably already filled in, such as the Output filename. In any case, here's a rundown on all the text boxes and widgets:

   • Output file. The name of the file that you distribute to people who want to install and run your application. The filename ends ...