Its 2nd Birthday of ADOBE AIR
Its 2nd Birthday for ADOBE AIR. AIR was started on February 25th, 2008 and with in this 2 years, it grew rapidly and adopted by many as better option for creating RIA for Desktop. You can see AIR Applications now everywhere in a wide variety of domains from Entertainment, News, Social Networking, eLearning, Video etc.
Its really great to use such a product and lets flourish it further...
Looking forward for the exciting new application on AIR...
Sample AIR Apps for New Features of AIR 2 BETA
Y'day Adobe has released its BETA versions of AIR 2 with a bunch of incredible new Features. These new Features help us build a wide vairety of new applications with new capabilities which were not there in AIR 1.
By this time you might all be knowing all the new Features that are part of AIR 2 BETA. Still to know more about new Features, check out Christian Cantrell's post.
There are some very good Sample apps in Adobe Library which were built based on these new capabilities and features.
MultiTouch Support: This is perhaps the most exciting feature as AIR 2 and Flash player 10.1 is going to support multi-touch on platforms like Windows 7 and MAC's Snow Leopard. Here are some apps which demonstrate the support for multi-touch:
Some useful Adobe AIR Apps you should know
Adobe AIR , as you all know, is platform-independent runtime with which web developers can use their expertise in RIA development to create Applications for Desktops.
There are some thousands of AIR applications available now for use.
HONGKIAT listed out some nice AIR applications which can be useful in our day-to-day activities. I found some applications which i dint knew about from this article.
Install and use these applications. Make this world full of AIR
...
AIR 2.0 Enhancements – Overview
As you all know that information about AIR 2.0 and its new enhancements is released recently.
People who are already working on AIR 1.0 will find it very useful to know what new enhancements AIR 2.0 is going to offer.
Elad Elron made an excellent post about these new enhancements and capabilities.
I am sure this information is useful to all RIA developers.
Creating Pop-Up Windows in Flex/AIR
Pop-ups are a vital part of any application. In this post, we are going to look into how a popup window can be designed in FLEX/AIR.
PopUpManager class is the one used to create new top-level windows and can be used to place above all the visible windows (making it a popUp). You can remove popUps as well using this class.
We can make these windows modal as well.
We can create a popUp using createPopUp method.
public static createPopUp(parent:DisplayObject, class:Class, modal:Boolean = false):IFlexDisplayObject
Here parent is the window over which the popup is going to appear, class is the reference to the custom MXML component which is going to act as pop-up, modal represents the Boolean value to decide on whether the popup is going to be modal or not.
FileSystem Componets in Adobe AIR
Flex File system components are the ones which combine the functionality of list controls like List, Tree, DataGrid etc with File System details. Using these File System components, we can design something like File Brower for your computer with in a matter of minutes.
Here are the Flex File System components:
- FileSystemComboBox: Shows hierarchical directories of selected directory
- FileSystemTree: displays contents of a directory as Tree
- FileSystemList: Shows the contents of a directory as List
- FileSystemDataGrid: Displays file information in a grid format
- FileSystemHistoryButton: Lets us move through the navigational history of another control
Skinning Flex/AIR Components
Skinning is like changin the look of the components. To skin Flex components, we can use either Bitmaps or swfs or programmatically we can skin.
In this post we will be looking into skinning Flex Components graphically i.e. using Bitmap images and using SWFs. Using skins we can define the whole appearance, different states of the components.
For example, we will see skinning a button now. We can give whole new look to different states of button like down, up, over etc.