Toluu : Marc's Musings

Marc's Musings

AIR / Browser API example

The other day I blogged about a wrapper class that I wrote to handle the AIR / Browser integration API. Below is an example of another class that I wrote that uses that wrapper class. It's capable of detecting two different AIR applications, installing them, and running them. It relies on the wrapper class to do all the heavy lifting, but I thought this might be a good example to help people get started.

package com.agileagenda.web

{

import com.roguedevelopment.air.AIRBrowserRuntime;

import com.roguedevelopment.air.AIRBrowserRuntimeEvent;

import flash.events.IOErrorEvent;

public class InstalledApplications

{

public static function get instance() : InstalledApplications

{

if( _instance == null ) { _instance = new InstalledApplications(); }

return _instanc

Interacting with an AIR app from a browser based appMarch 23

Interacting with an AIR app from a browser based app

We've all seen the AIR installation badges that let you install an AIR application from a website. But the API exposed to do that lets you do more than just a simple badge. I've been working on a web-based service for AgileAgenda. One of the components of that is to manage the list of files you've saved to the service and be able to open those in the desktop AIR application. So right from within the online Flex based app it sure would be nice to detect if the application is installed, give the user the option to install, and then launch it for them and automatically open the desired file. Something like this...

To implement that we need to:

Detect whether or not the application is installed.
Display the version number if it is. (Disable the "Open schedule in..." button if it's not)
When clicking on the "Open" link, launch the application with a few parameters so it know what to open.
When clicking on the "Install" link, install the application and pass a few parameters so it know what to open when it launches directly after the install.

Doing things like that falls outside of th

Boston Flex Users GroupMarch 22

I saw this posted today by Joe Berkovitz and it made my day. There's a new Flex users' group starting up and the best part, it's in Newton which is a few short miles from where I work.

http://www.bostonfug.org/

ObjectHandles DemoMarch 22

Here's a short demo of some of the stuff that ObjectHandles (my Flex library for moving & resizing stuff) can do with a very minimal amount of code.

The custom things I did:

Has a MOVING / RESIZING event handler to show a custom tooltip (hides the tooltip on MOVED / RESIZED)
Has custom resize handle images that look like grey horizontal bars
Only allows vertical resizing (allowHResize = false).
On a MOVED event, the objects have an animation that snaps them to a column.

It's a little hard to see in that video, but the duration & start time in the tooltip update as you move or resize the boxes around.

The power of RSSMarch 18

A year ago I didn't read any RSS feed. I browsed the internet like it was meant to be browsed, through websites! I read 3, maybe 4, sites daily. I occasionally viewed another dozen less frequently.

A year ago I started to add sites to my "web clips" bar on the top of my GMail account. They were all development related sites, mostly flash/flex. Pretty soon I had a dozen or so and I found myself clicking that little ">" button on the webclips bar over and over and over again to see more and more and more.

Six months ago I switched to Google Reader. I copied my list of RSS feeds from web-clips. And I added a few more. This was great, way easier reading them from the webclips interface. I subscribed to my Bugzilla bug list at work, no more refreshing a page to get a list. I unsubscribed from a few mailing lists I was a part of and picked up their feeds.

I now had a single, central,