Sometimes it is hard to find out how to do simple things when building a Flex or AIR application.  It's not that the documentation is lacking.  There are thousands of doc pages at Adobe, and then there are the wonderful video lessons over at Lynda.com.  The problem is that there is so much, and when you have a little question, your little question's answer is just a tiny dot in a sea of information, theory, and information about information.

So... here's a teeny question note.  How do you make your AIR app updateable?

Answer.  When you compile your new version, edit the YourAppName-app.xml file.  Make sure the version number is different from the original version number.  If your original version was v1, make this one v1.01, or v2. 

You aren't supposed to do it this way.  You are supposed to be in a sterile room, with no surprises, a thick plan, and a highly detailed map.  But web development is sometimes very different from developing indoors.  Often you are dealing with other people's oversights and follies, and since you can't just rewrite everything, you have to figure out ways to code around a thing rather than just burning the village down.  You are in the wild, stalking the ephemeral.

It is the high drama of a solitary person solving the seemingly unsolvable. You are alone, pushing through a blizzard of confusion.  You don't know how you got here, and you don't know how you are going to get out.  You have several options -- Google, your Safari bookshelf where you can get unlimited technical books, or you can field a question on one of your lists you participate in.  If the monster you are facing down is abstract enough, you can ask a mathematician.

Panic rises, you run ahead of it.  First you Google.  Luck is with you, you get a couple of good prospects.  You pick one, on a hunch.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.
-- Louis Sullivan, Architect, 1896

I have noticed that most people, when pondering a new website, begin by looking at ready made templates, other people's websites (many of which were made from ready-made templates), settle on one with their own unique modifications (such as logo), and then try to fit what they want to do into that pre-defined format.

I suggest that the opposite approach may prove more fruitful.  Start with your data and your purpose.  What do you want to do?  Share information?  Do you have a large database of inventory or information you wish to present in a friendly way?  Do you wish to write often?  Do you have a lot of pictures you want to show?  What is your main intent?  Once you have defined what it is you want to do, think about how your information could be best presented.   You might need dynamically generated charts and graphs based on your data, or you might need a shopping system, or a blog format.

After you have defined your purpose, and decided on what you want to present, how, you can accessorize and emphasize with a coherent design.  It is very important for the programmer, who makes things go, work very closely with the designer, who makes things look right.

I posted a question on a list I participate in and this is the conversation so far. I thought the discussion had some useful information, so I'm posting it with Ed's permission:

Does anyone here have any opinions about QuickForm, the PEAR package? I am using it in a fairly big way right now, that is, the app I'm writing using QuickForm will serve as a checkout form to a store application and there are many stores which will be using it. I've used it here and there on other projects and I've worked on a project where it was the technology of choice for form construction, but I've never run across any opinions about it.

My opinion is that it is quite good, and I don't understand why it seems to be used very rarely. Maybe there's something wrong with it I just don't see. Or maybe it's just sort of obscure.

Peggy

When you create a presence on the web, you can't just pull the parts out of a box, glue it together with the language of your choice, publish, and then stand back and admire it.

It's more like going to war.  You want to be well armed, and have a battle plan, but when things get gritty, you have to be able to morph with the circumstances, improvise, and be willing try out the most cutting edge whiz kid state of the art weaponry when the opportunity presents itself.

Whatever you do, you don't want to kill bystanders.  You need to know enough about server technology to stay out of the way of the core of things, but if you need to make some adjustments, you need to have that knowledge as part of your kit.

iday, I gave myself a mini-crash course in advanced Adobe Flex development.  I learned to use the Timer class -- which is very cool because you can fire off functions after a designated amount of time has passed.  Still haven't dreamed up all the things this could be useful for -- I used it in a slide show, probably the most obvious, fairly pedestrian use of this class.  I'm sure I'll think up more subtle ways to use it.  And I learned t create a configurable component.

This is great.  To date, I've been making Flex apps by putting together building blocks and creating Actionscript functions to make things happen, mostly reading data into a DataGrid widget, and when I've needed a custom component, I've used other people's.  Now I know how to make my own custom component, and how to set configurable variables and act on the values sent to the component.  This opens up new doors, and paves the way for better looking, efficient, and more useful Flex apps.

The php behind this little slide show reads the copy from a database table, and the pictures from a folder, creates arrays of these two collections, and writes an XML file which is then consumed by the Flex app.