AIR crashes upon PDF display on MacOSX

Work­ing with pdf doc­u­ments is really nice now that it’s part of the work­flow of a major­ity of com­pa­nies. But the Adobe AIR team still has a lot of work ahead of them to let flash han­dle pdf. Now, the only pos­si­bil­ity we have to com­mu­ni­cate with a pdf within an air appli­ca­tion requires four platforms/languages : as3->html->javascript->pdf. No won­der there are bugs com­ing one after the other.

Toxic snow con­t­a­m­i­nates the AIR

Or is it the other way around ?

We recently put to use the fea­ture of dynamic pdf load­ing in AIR and we met a lit­tle prob­lem. If you try to open a pdf doc­u­ment within the HTM­L­Loader on a MacOSX Snow Leop­ard, your appli­ca­tion mis­er­ably crashes. I’m sur­prised I didn’t find much infor­ma­tion but a few forum threads about this.

Ran­dom fact n°2401 : snow leop­ards do eat any­thing you throw at them

You can read about it on google groups but you won’t find any clue to a solu­tion what­so­ever. Doing what Hit­omi Kudo from the AIR team advises doesn’t change anything.

The prob­lem either comes from Adobe air + pdf or from Snow Leop­ard. There were many changes under the hood of Snow Leop­ard. The after effects were quite sim­i­lar to the release of Vista. A lot of things didn’t work and required new dri­vers and blabla. So I wouldn’t be sur­prised Adobe didn’t see this one com­ing. — Just like Apple’s sly attempts to avoid the Flash Player on the iPhone — (sub­lim­i­nal message).

Still we’re stuck with this prob­lem and there is no way to dis­play a pdf in an air appli­ca­tion under snow leopard.

We also tried an advice on this post on the adobe forum with­out suc­cess. It basi­cally says you should add “file://” when you call a file on MacOSX.


Alpha…ville

It is only nat­ural that you would enable the alpha on your appli­ca­tion so that your rounded bor­ders or what­ever look nice. Well for­get that if you intend to use pdf doc­u­ments ! Enabling the alpha on the appli­ca­tion level is cause to so many issues that it reminds me of the “trans­par­ent wmode” beast to avoid at all cost on web­sites. This isn’t the web though. Per­haps if we shout all together at once “we want alpha”, some Adobe devel­op­ers will hear us wher­ever they lurk.

WE-WANT-ALPHA ! *pretty please !*

Überlays

To com­plete the pic­ture, we found yet another annoy­ing bug. In the same con­fig­u­ra­tion, an air appli­ca­tion with a pdf within an htm­l­loader, the htm­l­loader is mask­ing every­thing that should be on top of it. So if you have a com­bobox just over your htm­l­loader, try and click on the com­bobox and the panel which expends down will be masked, as if it were in a lesser child index than the htm­l­loader instance. What a drag.

Inte­grat­ing the PDF reader into AIR does seem to be a huge task for the amount of bugs we get with each update…

How about AIR 1.5.4 ? or AIR 2.0 ? Let us be patient.