How to update AIR SDK for Flex Builder

Here's an overlay video for a previous version of AIR, but it should still be applicable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpV9eUWzKMk

How to build .air using adt.jar ?

bin-debug> java -jar "e:/Adobe/Adobe Flash Builder 4/sdks/4.1.0/lib/adt.jar" -package -storetype pkcs12 -keystore ..\SCP_Operator_Station.p12 -tsa none SCP_Operator_Station.air SCP_Operator_Station-app.xml SCP_Operator_Station.swf RMA.swf rma_config.xml

Sprite vs MovieClip

http://www.theflashstudio.net/articles/movieClips.php

Movie Clips

MovieClip merely adds the timeline capability to the Sprite class, and are reusable pieces of flash animation - consisting of one or more graphic/button symbols - thus they are flash movies within your flash movie. They have their own non-restricted Timeline (any number of layers and frames - just like the main timeline) that plays independent of the main movie's Timeline. The best thing about using movieclips is that you can control them from actionscript - you can change their dimensions, position, color, alpha, and other properties and can even duplicate and delete them.

Sprites

The Sprite class is new in ActionScript 3.0. It provides an alternative to the functionality of the MovieClip class. Sprites and Movie Clips are virtually identical in what they can hold and what they can do. Sprite is a type of DisplayObject and it is the class that MovieClip directly extends from, (so all MovieClips are Sprites). Use Sprites when you want to draw shapes with ActionScript. Sprites are generally the display object to use as they are highly functional and take little memory. Sprites do not have timelines so if you would like to create an animation contained within the display object, a Movie Clip is the display object to use.

Flex - TileList vs Tile

The DataGroup and SkinnableDataContainer, using a TileLayout class, replace the Flex 3 technique of using a repeater and the Tile container. A repeater in Flex 3 was a simple mechanism for looping over a collection of data (such as an array), which could be used to dynamically create child display objects in a container such as a Tile.

As a general guideline, TileList is usually the more logical way to go. Using a TileList consumes less memory and produces a faster initial response, because it renders only the viewable portion of the data. As you scroll to bring more items into view, they must be rendered on the fly, causing a momentary blank spot in their place (hint: one way of mitigating this is to display a little swirling loader icon until the item is rendered), increasing the lag time between scroll movement and a repainted window.

In contrast to the way item renderers are handled by List-based components, a Tile renders all children at once, whether it’s within the dimensions of the stage’s current viewport or not. If you have a decent number of items to be rendered, be careful if you go this route, because the stage won’t paint itself until every display object (including all those renderers!) has completed the component lifecycle (see Flex in Action chapter 17 for more on this) and is ready to be displayed. On a slower connection, this could take a long time. On the plus side, once the render is complete, scrolling is seamless, with the only real limitation now being the hardware resources available (for example, scrolling fast will make CPU usage go up a lot because graphics rendering unfortunately can’t be offloaded to the graphics processor, and so the Flash Player is limited to a single thread on the main CPU to render everything on the stage).