Chapter 12. Application and Window Native Menus
Operating systems provide facilities for creating menus; these
menus are called native menus. Adobe AIR supports
working with native menus, and the recipes in this chapter show you how to
build several types of native menus. At this writing, AIR supports
application, window, context, and pop-up menus. Application and window menus
serve the same purpose but on different platforms. Specifically, window
menus are available only on Windows, and application menus are available
only on Macs. Computer users are familiar with the typical native menus, so
the usability of your AIR application improves a lot when you offer users
application or window menus.
To create native menus, the Adobe AIR classes to use are flash.display.NativeMenu and flash.display.NativeMenuItem.
To create context menus, you can also use the classes flash.ui.ContextMenu and flash.ui.ContextMenuItem.
Note
AIR enables you to create system tray and Dock icon menus as well.
See Chapter 13 for more information
on these custom taskbar and Dock menus.
You want to create a menu for your AIR application and
present the menu as an application menu or window menu depending on the
user’s operating system.
Use the NativeMenu constructor
to create the base menu, attach child NativeMenuItem objects, and then set the
top-level base menu as the menu for the AIR application or window
depending on your preference or the operating system.