AIR

Touchwood is proud to present UI Marker Beta 1. UI Marker is a Flex component that allows users to draw squares, lines, and notes on an AIR application's UI and save the screenshot as a PNG. This tool is valuable for design reviews and/or client input and feedback.

How to implement:

Let's say you want to setup your app to where a user can click F12 and make notations. Here's how you do it.

Problem:

How can an AIR application detect if a link or an image has been clicked inside an HTMLControl?

Solution:

Create an app to loop through all images and links in the web page's DOM and attach click listeners to them.

Last night I was reading this Adobe forum thread about the pros and cons of AIR applications executing other applications. Product manager Rod Christensen left a post explaining Adobe's reasoning for this limitation. Here are the main points of interest:

"The primary reason that AIR 1.0 does not include support for launching
native applications originates from a founding design
decision/philosophy. Applications that do not depend on other
applications to be installed result in a better user experience. Our
goal with AIR has been to deliver a runtime that delivers applications
consistently across operating systems. Please note that this doesn't
mean we're right nor that we might not change our minds on this."

...............

"As with any design decision, there's plenty of opportunity to debate
the topic and this is something we continue to discuss even internally.
The major disadvantage is that it's much more difficult to take
advantage of existing code libraries or launch other native"
applications. "

"At the same time, one advantage to the current
design is that when you distribute an application, you do not need to
say, 'This is a really great application, but make sure you have
Microsoft Windows (or OSX) installed as well as Microsoft Word (or
Photoshop or some other native product) to really take advantage of
this application.''

Needed Resources:

• Adobe Flex Builder 3 or Flex Builder 3 plug-in for Eclipse

Final Product:

A small application that traces out the contents of the user's documents directory. This was originally a posting for help by Boombanguk in the FlashKit message boards.

Needed Resources:

• Adobe Flex Builder 3 or Flex Builder 3 plug-in for Eclipse
• The xml file attached to this post.

Final Product:

An AIR application with a load xml and save xml button. The load button prompts the user to find an xml file titled "person.xml." Once the user has selected the file, the first name and last name of the person will be displayed in two text inputs. The user can then edit these entries and save them back to the file using the save button.

Needed Resources:

• Webcam
• Adobe Flex Builder 3 or Flex Builder 3 plug-in for Eclipse
• This class from zero point nine

Final Product:

A simple AIR application that records a video stream from a webcam and saves a temporary FLV file to the desktop. The UI will consist of a window displaying the current video feed and a button to start and stop recording.