How can a SWF file, embedded in an HTML page, check if the Adobe AIR runtime is installed?
I directly asked this question to the Adobe AIR team (you can check their blog). Rob and Franck answered my question with detailed information: “The install badge makes use of a private Flash Player API that can query the system for specific files at specific locations. This API requires Flash Player 9.0.115 and above. The only way to use this API is to rely on the air.swf file, hosted on adobe.com. It exposes a higher level API to badges hosted on third party sites. The APIs that air.swf implements allow badges to query if AIR is installed, if a particular AIR application is installed, install an AIR application, and launch an AIR application.” You can customize the install badge. The source code is located in the ’samples’ folder of the Flex SDK. A default badge.swf is provided, and just using FlashVars, you can customize the application name, the application url, the AIR version required, the image, etc… Now you understand what the AIR launchpad does. It creates a HTML Wrapper with
