We are working on a little AIR application here at work. We are automating the clockin/out/break/lunch process and using a cute little AIR app to do it. But as building desktop applications is not as easy to deploy updates as a webpage, I wanted to make sure that before the first version went out we had the auto update feature working.

All in all I was pretty impressed by how this works. There are several steps that go towards this actually happening:
* Decided if the application needs updating.
* Download the updated AIR file.
* Use the updater.update() function to trigger the Runtime to install the application.

How these things actually happen is entirely up to your application is built. But ours looks like this:
* Application loads and gets version.txt from the server
* Uses version.txt’s value to verify if app needs to be upgraded
* Downloads the updated application
* On Download complete calls Updater.update() using our version and air file.

This process can actually end up being a bunch of code. And after having done this, I can see how this process could easily be abstracted into our own custom updater component. The good news for me is that I dont need to do that. [Clause](http://wahlers.com.br/claus/blog/automating-remote-software-updates-in-adobe-air-applications/) has created just such a component called [AIR Remote Updater](http://codeazur.com.br/lab/airremoteupdater/). And better yet, his version uses FZip to pull just the app.xml file from the AIR file on the server so you don’t have to keep a separate version file. How Cool!

So as I consider this to be right near the top priority of an AIR application I think you should get on over to Claus’s blog and give him a huge thanks. Because he just saved you a couple hours of work for each of your applications.