In a time like this when it’s finally cool again to rant on Flash, I recently rediscovered thanks to a memory on Facebook that I had videos of a few experiments I did with Flex and AIR. I’ve never really been a good web guy. Even now that I try to experiment from time to time with React (which is awesome, don’t get me wrong), I’ve always been a (native or not) standalone application kind of guy. I remember these days at school where I experimented with Java and Swing and then Flex when I wrote a couple of AIR Desktop applications. I’m not sure how relevant this is because I lost/trashed the sources ages ago but I figured it would be fun to post them here.

NOE - SITRA touch demo from Palleas on Vimeo.

This idea behind this application was to allow the user to create his perfect week-end using a touristic database.

Experiment - AIR Application Window management from Palleas on Vimeo.

This one was the very first prototype to see how we could manage multiple windows. As you may have seen with the video above, we went for a simpler approach.

Experiment - ztamp from Palleas on Vimeo.

We had a nabaztag at the office and they came with little RFID chips that you could configure to execute a little Apple Script when detected…

Experiment - ztamp 2 from Palleas on Vimeo.

… or open an application.

Experiment : Flex 4 custom slider from Palleas on Vimeo.

This one is one of my favourite (and ended up in the SITRA-we application. It was the very first custom component I made with Flex 4.

I really had a blast working with those technologies. Even if I stopped making AIR applications a couple of years ago, those really helped shaping me into the developer that I am today. This really made me want to dig through old external hard drives. I’m pretty sure I have other side projects that never made it to production that would be fun to share in another throwback kind of post.