We were plagued all day today at the TechCrunch offices with a faulty Yammer Air app. Updates weren’t working or were seriously delayed, and most of us just moved over to the web version to get reliable service. We rely heavily on Yammer to communicate asynchronously across our very distributed team (three continents). I didn’t realize how heavily until today when the service wasn’t working properly.
I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem – it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.
Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.
We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery.
In the meantime, we all downloaded Gabble, a native OSX Yammer client, and everything is smooth sailing again.
no problems reported on Seesmic Desktop air app that we know of, will check
Seesmic worked fine all day.
…Oh and full disclosure: My pal Mike is an investor in the product I’m pitching here. Thanks for the plug.
twhirl sweems fine
No problems on twhirl so far for me.
Hey Mike, I’m checking with folks internally but as far as I know, we didn’t push any updates out today that would cause issues.
I run the @air twitter account and track AIR mentions but didn’t see any more problems with AIR than I usually see today.
We’ll reach out to the folks at Yammer and see if we can’t brainstorm what the problem might be.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
twhirl working fine all day (both twitter & laconica) on XP (out of Australia)
twhirl work fine all day (both twitter & laconica)
Win XP – working in Australia
sure are a lot of you guys using twhirl.
That’s cuz it kicks ass
I was going to pipe in as well and say I had no problems with twhirl today, but I see several others have already said the same thing. Ah well… I’ll continue to use twhirl and enjoy zero problems
What is your beef with Adobe AIR apps?
I use Tweetdeck and has been chirping along as usual
The Crunchbase widget says Adobe was founded in 2001 and IPOed in 1986.
TweetDeck v0.26.4 appeared slow on my Vista machine earlier today but was responding much better by late afternoon.
Hi Michael,
We’re looking into this. This is the first I have heard of this issue and it does seem very peculiar in that you are reporting it impacts Yammer running on Leopard. We have not pushed out a new version of AIR since AIR 1.5.2 which came out at the very end of July. Chances are, you have been using AIR 1.5.2 for awhile. Our team is investigating and I’ll follow-up with more information.
Thank you,
-Rob
Product Manager, Adobe AIR
Rob,
Just because you have AIR 1.5.2 installed does not mean you are using AIR 1.5.2. AIR runs its apps with the version that they were compiled with. Unless the AIR Yammer app was updated to use the brand new 1.5.2 version that came out in July, even if Mike had installed AIR 1.5.2, he hasn’t been using it.
Just keeping this conversation on a
oops. got cut off.
Just keeping this conversation on track with accurate information.
@Steven – Similar to browsers like Firefox, AIR checks to see if a new version of the runtime is available and automatically downloads the update. Almost all users will be prompted to update to the latest version within around two weeks of a new version being released. It is currently not possible to have multiple versions of AIR installed. While it is true that applications are bound to a specific version number defined in the application descriptor, the application will use the most recent version of the runtime installed on the machine. In other words, if Yammer’s application descriptor file is AIR 1.5.1 and the latest installed version of AIR is 1.5.2, the application will run against AIR 1.5.2, but its behavior, including the API’s it has access to, will be limited to AIR 1.5.1.
They key point is that you can only have one version of AIR installed at a time. If Mike had AIR 1.5.2 installed (which is a strong probability), he most definitely was using it to run Yammer.
As others have speculated, this issue may have been related to a networking issue or changes to the application. We are still investigating to confirm though. We have been unable to reproduce the issue at this point. – Rob, Adobe AIR Team
You and I are agreeing, we’re just using different ways of describing it.
“The application will run against AIR 1.5.2, but its behavior, including the API’s it has access to, will be limited to AIR 1.5.1.”
If you fix a “bug” in a new release of AIR and there was code in an app to work around said bug in the version it was written against, fixing it could break the app. To ensure backwards compatibility, the 1.5.1 app continues to run against 1.5.1.
For the record, according to the Adobe Marketplace, the Yammer app was written in AIR 1.5.0.
Our SocialSafe app which runs on Adobe Air seems to be working fine and with no trouble reports received to date
Sounds more like a temp DNS issue that went down and back up. No client or server mods nec. to create minor, temporary havok.
My TweetDeck working fine on ubuntu 8.x
This headline is irresponsible.
Actually it’s kind of silly from an Adobe AIR developer point of view. Whatever difference there was in the app I was testing was due to changes I made to the code, not due to whether AIR was going through the period or not, which is what the article headline makes you think.
it’s obvious that only Yammer is having problems. Don’t blame Adobe and its fantastic AIR!
Works fine for me
Yammer set you up the bomb. You’ve been h4×0r3d.
@Michael – Just to follow-up, we have not been able to reproduce this issue so far. I have reached out to the Yammer team to see if perhaps they were having networking or other issues with the application that they already addressed. It would be helpful to know if you are still seeing the issue with the AIR client and the exact behavior you are seeing. If there is someone on your team I can follow-up with that was running into issues, I’d be happy to reach out to them. Thanks! – Rob
Client having issues installing AIR application that installed fine just a few days ago. I also cannot install the application. Also, I cannot update AIR from 1.5.1.8210 to 1.5.2.8870. All previously installed AIR applications work under the 1.5.1 release.
Something weird is going on
Been having a ridiculous amount of trouble with tweetdeck – it keeps timing out while trying to sign in… Seesmic on the other hand seems to be working fine…
tweetdeck has been acting up on me all day and yesterday too actually – seesmic crashes on exit attempt (not responding) and TweetDeck cant communicate with the server…
hehhe its joke or real?
http://live-point.net
MyBooo Desktop works fine as usual
LoomTV works fine- no probs with the air app so far. Not even on Leopard.
Gabble is so much better than running an AIR app – Love their no Adobe sign.
DestroyTwitter And Mixero worked fine all day long.
Firefox dies in Snow Leopard whenever playing flash movies. it sucks! Safari is good.
The Trakkboard App still works fine on Windows and OSX.
I’m not sure if this is related, but ever since AIR 1.5.2 was released, we’ve gotten a tsunami of customer emails complaining their installation failed. Every single email is from a customer running 64-bit OS, whether it be XP/Vista/OS X/or Linux.
We’ve had an ongoing thread on the Adobe AIR google group (air-tight) about it, but I can’t get any of the customers to send me the appinstall logs. The one I could get Oliver Goldman said didn’t point to anything.
Maybe this is related, maybe it’s not *shrug*
@Damon – I’d like to learn more about this issue. I will follow-up with you by sending an email using your website. – Rob, Adobe AIR Team
It’s just Yammer.
The only AIR desktop app that is giving trouble is Yammer, while several others are working just fine.
I clicked on a link on techcrunch and got a page not found error. Apparently TechCrunch broke the internet.
Michael:
LOL! This title of this thread should be “How to get immediate, top level technical support from Adobe”. Hope you all find the cause. Good luck!
Duane
If you’re on a Mac and you need to use Yammer but don’t like Air or yet another desktop client try connecting with Adium, we use it all the time.
Hrmm, I have yet to run into any issues with AIR, but as a developer who uses AIR this does worry me, hopefully Adobe will address this issue soon.
I’ve had my machine freeze with Air apps a few times – they’ve always been related to an app trying to update my keychain. Perhaps try this on mac, go into keychain access, try deleting your Adobe.APS for yammer and then restarting yammer.
We too have had issues being reported by users having trouble installing as of late, on both Vista and Mac OS, when our test computers have had no issues at all.
I have sent emails to those who have contacted us, asking if they are on 64-bit machines. I will report the responses here.
> This title of this thread should be “How to get
> immediate, top level technical support from
> Adobe”
That’s funny. I want to laugh, but it is too true.
Where is the “hotline” we can subscribe to to learn more about what is learned about this issue/non-issue?