One of the new features in Flash Professional CS6, is the integrated management of AIR SDKs. In previous versions of Flash Professional, this was a multi-step process of editing XML files, and managing directories. I have forgotten how many times I missed a simple attribute in an XML file and screwed something up.
Recently I was updating my copy of Flash to use the just released AIR 3.3 SDK. Currently, Flash Professional ships with AIR 3.2 as the target SDK. (I wonder if with the Creative Cloud, would we see a ‘new’ build of Flash Professional that shipped with 3,3?)
The steps to add an additional SDK to Flash Professional are fairly straight forward.
Go to the Help menu, and select Manage AIR SDK…
Note: You will need to have downloaded the AIR SDK previously. This manager does not handle that portion of the process.
Click the + icon in the upper right, and then select the location where you have decompressed the AIR SDK.
And with that, Flash Professional CS6 can now build AIR 3.3 projects. So much easier than before.
But there is a word of caution that needs to be added to this process. After adding the new SDK, I realized that I might want to create a better directory structure to handle possible future versions of Adobe AIR. Here is what my folder initially looked like:
AIR SDK Folder Before
So, I created a directory named 3.3 and moved all the contents into it.
AIR SDK Folder After
I then relaunched Flash, and it crashed with no warnings! I never even saw the splash screen come up. In a bit of a panic, as I was going to be demoing Flash shortly, I copied the AIR SDK back out of the directory I just made, and relaunched Flash. And, you guessed it, no problems. Crisis averted. I went back into the Manage AIR SDK window, deleted the reference to the original 3.3 SDK, then added the version now stored within a better file structure.
I certainly was not expecting such a hard crash do to this issue
Now to file the formal bug report in JIRA…
