File this under “this is such a stupidly easy fix I can’t believe I wasted so much time on it.” To get Box2DAS3 to work in Flex/AIR, you need to make sure your m_timeStep variable is “1.0/30.0″ and not just “1/30.” Go figure. Didn’t think Flash cared about that stuff. Thanks to this page for giving the answer.

Wines of the World has been a great class. Go to school, drink wine, boom. Done. But don’t be fooled - it is a serious class with serious projects. For my final project, I decided to have a crack at AIR and make something wine-related in the process - an RSS reader that takes Wine Spectator’s Daily Editor’s Picks feed and presents today’s wines of choice. Last night, armed with Matt’s extremely useful book and my free educational copy of Flex Builder, I began my first AIR app.

Of course, though, I ran into my share of problems, so I thought I would share what I learned here in case anyone else has the same problem.

• Custom Chrome: As you can tell from my comp above, I required my app to be free of the OS’s default chrome. There are countless tutorials out there about how to do this, and after reading all of them I still had not yet realized that you had to remove the comments around the <initialWindow> tag in Flex’s app.xml file. That was dumb on my part, but seriously, of the three video tutorials Adobe put up on the exact same subject, not one mentions it.
• Embedding Fonts: I found this very useful if you want to embed a PostScript font into your project.
• Publishing: It took me quite a while to find out that I don’t actually have to pay to have my AIR app published with a signed certificate, and that you can just make one yourself. Instructions on how to do that are here.

Over the course of this project, I have definitely grown to like the wild HTML/CSS/ActionScript fusion that is Flex and AIR. I think that with some more practice, I can get quite comfortable with it. And if you want to download a copy of my app, you can get it here. It’s missing a few features and details, but I think it’s a nice start. I feel like I should add that I am in no way associated with Wine Spectator magazine, they just happened to have the nicest RSS feed available.