nothing yet | jason madsen

10 Dec, 2009

Adobe Air Version Checker

Posted by: jason In: All

So I had a bit of an annoying morning today. I went to update from AIR 1.5.2 to the latest release (1.5.3). The process didn’t go so smoothly. Long story short the updater would just hang up and sit there. I tried uninstalling 1.5.2 to get a fresh version of 1.5.3 rather than an update. No luck, the uninstaller wouldn’t work. I kept getting error messages about possibly not being an admin on my machine. Not true, I am the admin…. So what to do… Looking around the interwebz, it doesn’t seem like others are having the same trouble.

I checked permissions, restarted. Tried again, no luck. Tried again, and what? It tells me that I already have 1.5.3 installed. Huh? On which of the failed attempts did that happen? So I thought I would check the version number somehow. After a bit of googling. I found no easy way to verify the version number. You can do it programatically from within ActionScript. To do so you simply look at the following:

NativeApplication.nativeApplication.runtimeVersion

Looking at that property from within your IDE will tell you which version of the runtime you have in your installed SDK. To see which actual version of AIR is installed for AIR apps that you are running on the machine you need to execute the code within that environment.

So I built a quick little widget that displays the installed runtime version. Nothing too fancy here, just a utility. Feel free to install and use it via the badge installer below…

Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.

You can install the widget from the install badge above, or you can download the .air installer here

7 Responses to "Adobe Air Version Checker"

1 | Adrian Parr

December 11th, 2009 at 6:50 am

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Hi Jason,

Thanks for that. It’s pretty handy.
It’s annoying there isn’t an easier way for people to check what their installed version number is.

Cheers,

Adrian

2 | Adrian Parr

December 11th, 2009 at 7:04 am

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I hope you don’t mind, I’ve re-blogged about this on my site …

http://www.adrianparr.com/?p=122

3 | jason

December 11th, 2009 at 7:36 am

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I’m glad someone else found it usefull. Thanks for the mention

4 | DL1t

December 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm

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if you don’t mind using undocumented features, you can simply use this from Flash Player, without making AIR app:

import adobe.utils.ProductManager;
var mgr:ProductManager = new ProductManager(“airappinstaller”);
if(mgr.installed){
trace(mgr.installedVersion);
}

5 | jason

December 11th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

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Very cool. I remember now running into the Product Manager a while back while looking into AIR install badges, but never took the time to investigate further. Thanks for the comment.

6 | Chris

January 18th, 2010 at 4:13 pm

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Thanks Jason. I found this useful little Adobe knowledgebase article, which gives you a way to check the version of AIR on Mac and Linus systems:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/407/kb407625.html

I can’t find anything similar for Windows.

7 | jason

January 18th, 2010 at 5:34 pm

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@Chris Nice find. I hadn’t seen that article, thanks for the link. Jason.

Comment Form


  • Bala: i figured out my problem for anyone else struggling with this: http://forums.adobe.com/message/110535#110535 You can no longer call installAppli
  • Bala: Hey jason, thanks for the suggestion. i do in deed have that in my descriptor file. I was able to narrow my problem, I think it is a scope issue, m
  • jason: @Bala, My first suggestion would be to ensure that your AIR application has the 'allowBrowserInvocation' set to true in your application descriptor

About

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Jason Madsen is a Flash, Flex, ActionScript developer who teaches the Flex Framework and OOP Concepts at Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida.


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