Developing BlackBerry Tablet Applications with Flex 4.5

Chapter 6. OS Interactions

Open in Browser

From within your application, you can open a link using the device’s native browser, just like with a traditional, browser-based Flex application. The URLRequest class accomplishes this. The URLRequest class accomplishes this. Let’s take a look at the following code. Simply creating a new URLRequest and passing it into the navigateToURL method will invoke the user’s browser to handle the request. Figure 6-1 shows the sample application running.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"
               xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark">

    <fx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            protected function sendIt_clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
            {
                var s:String = "";
                s+= address.text;
                navigateToURL(new URLRequest(s));

            }
        ]]>
    </fx:Script>

    <fx:Declarations>
        <!-- Place non-visual elements (e.g., services, value objects) here -->
    </fx:Declarations>

    <s:Label text="URL" top="40" left="50"/>
    <s:TextInput id="address" top="30" left="160" text="http://www.happytoad.com" 
width="250"/>
    <s:Button id="sendIt" label="Open" click="sendIt_clickHandler(event)" top="110" 
left="160"/>
</s:Application>

Figure 6-1. Open a link in a browser

Splash Screen

Adobe has made it very easy to add a splash screen to your application. A splash screen is an image that loads first and displays while the application is loading. There are also several options for ...