Playing with Air...

I thought i’d do a little bit of serious work with Air - how about an application for converting text file formats? Well ok, it sounds boring, but it’s a starting point. I’m not finished yet, but my deadline is pretty harsh (Wednesday, in fact!) so I’m hoping to have another update tomorrow, once I’ve ironed out a few remaining bugs (and removed the chance that the application will corrupt your files!)

What is it?

This Air app. should take an ANSI or other unusually formatted text file, and save it out as UTF-8.

Why?

The need for this app. is pretty simple, really. If you make a Macro - don’t shudder - to export MS Office content to text files (like, xml files) you can’t specify the encoding of the outputted files. Although the content makes it out, it’s encoded in (usually) Windows-1252 format (aka ANSI). When Flash - or many other XML-reading products, like Internet Explorer or Firefox - import the XML file, and come across incorrectly encoded characters, they tend to crash and burn. If the file is properly saved as UTF-8 however, everyone plays nicely. Now this can be done by opening the file in notepad and changing the encoding type, but that wouldn’t be so fun, would it?

When can I try it?

A safe, stable version should be available aroundabout the 9th April. (Conventiently just after the Adobe On Air tour)