I’ve just spent the past few days pulling my hair out trying to update Adobe AIR on my Mac. I thought maybe uninstalling everything and starting over would help. It didn’t, all that left me with was no Adobe AIR at all. And no Adobe AIR, meant no Seesmic Desktop. I read through the Adobe support stuff which was pretty useless. The error message I keep getting when trying to update Adobe AIR applied to Windows installations according to Adobe.
I had the Adobe AIR Uninstaller. I ran it a couple of times. I tried all the suggested command line prompts. I tried everything logged in as the root. Nothing was letting me reinstall Adobe AIR.
So I posted to Twitter and did Google searches. The Google searches took me back to the Adobe Forums. Other people where having the same problem I was having and it looked like this had been going on for a while. One of the posts, “Adobe AIR not installing properly.”, had a great tip, look at the log files!
My log file had something odd in it:
Jul 9 20:27:24 /Volumes/Adobe AIR 1/Adobe AIR Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe AIR Installer[1088]: error during install: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled exception Error: Could not create directory /Applications/Adobe/Flash Player/AddIns/airappinstaller" errorID=3010]
Why on earth could it not create the directory? So I took a peek in the Application folder and there was an old text file called Adobe. I renamed the text file and ran the Adobe AIR installer. I was pleasantly surprised when it announced it had completed the install. As soon as I was successful, I went back to the forums to post my solution. I figured it was the right thing to do since I posted my issue as a reply to a few other threads.
Now I’m a happy camper with Seesmic Desktop running again!
ps…I tried the Seesmic Desktop 2 Preview. It’s nice, but does have all the bells & whistles yet. On the plus side is didn’t need Adobe AIR.
Holy crap! That’s exactly the same problem as what I’ve been having. (except I’ve been sadly missing my Pandora Radio app)… There it was a file called “Adobe” from 2005 written in HTML welcoming me to the 30-day trial of Adobe Photoshop CS2! Oy.