Beer Near Here Desktop
One of the coolest aspects of Beer Near Here, in my humble opinion, is the desktop version. Beer Near Here is primarily a website about information, specifically, displaying information in a legible manner. That sort of site doesn’t mesh well with a cool, out-there design or lots of Flash or Javascript effects, which is why developing BNH Desktop was so refreshing. Yes, the app is still primarily about displaying information to the user but in targeting AIR I’m free to embrace all the cool animations and effects offered by that platform.
I could do much of what BNH Desktop does on the web, but I’d have to rely on users having Flash and for the users that don’t, well, I have to handle them as well, usually by gracefully degrading the experience. All of this is a lot of work and testing and, again, in my humble opinion, not usually worth it. From a design standpoint I think a website should be embraced for what it is and not shoehorned into some Flash app that just happens to run in a web browser.
I’ll now step down off my soapbox and get back to the point of this post: Beer Near Here Desktop is a cool example of an AIR application and I want to cut it open and share all it’s secrets. When I decided to write this app the first thing I did was check out what else is out there for AIR and something that kept showing up was Kuler for AIR.
Kuler, is an Adobe application for creating color swatches and, from everything I read, the AIR version is something that was written to show off some of the cool things you can do with AIR. And sure enough it does show these things off. It has custom skin and some neat effects. The trouble is that there is no explanation of how to accomplish any of this. It’s almost a tease, “See, you can do all this cool stuff…but we’re not going to tell you how.”
Undeterred, I went on to do some more Googling and reading with the end result being Beer Near Here Desktop. You should check it out. FYI, I’m not paying $300 to sign my code with Verisign so you’ll have to just trust me on the install.
Some of the neat features of BNH Desktop include:
- A custom skin. In Flex/AIR parlance this is “custom chrome”.
- A loading/waiting animation that integrates with the skin.
- A flip effect.
- Custom roll-over buttons.
So now you know you can do these things and I aim to explain them as well. But for that you’ll have to stay tuned until next time as I want to give each feature it’s due.