Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 42. Native Desktop Support with AIR

In this chapter, we'll be looking more at Adobe AIR's support for interacting with native operating system functionality. We'll cover working with native windows and native menus, both of which will be rendered by the operating system. For those users of your software running on OS X, you'll be able to provide support for the Dock and application menus. Windows users will get support for the System Tray. Both can be supported from the same AIR application and allow your users to work with your software with the native look and feel of the operating system they've chosen.

Plus, we'll look at a couple of techniques, network detection, and user presence, useful for writing chat or instant messaging software.

Working with Windows

When creating applications with Adobe AIR, your applications will be able to take advantage of the native operating system's windows for displaying data. This is nice because users of your application will feel right at home with their chosen operating system while using your application. NativeWindows are also useful because you don't have to rely on only rendering windows inside the Flash Player's main stage of your AIR application (as you would if you used Flex's TitleWindow). With AIR, you can display pop-up message notification windows from the Windows Status Bar or OS X Dock or transparent window with animation floating over the desktop of your preferred operating system.

When creating cross-platform applications ...