I recently wrote a post over on the Buk Life blog about creating native menus with Adobe AIR in Mac OS. The emphasis of the article is making the “application name” menu (e.g., “Safari” for the Safari browser) look like it belongs when creating customized application menus.
You can read the full article here: Creating Application Menus in Mac OSX with Adobe AIR.
Back in August I took a new job as a Flex Developer at BKWLD in Seattle. I now primaril work on an Adobe AIR application called Elastic Sales that is a new take on a catalog and ordering systems.
BKWLD also has it’s own blog so I’ll be blogging about work-related topics and things I learn about Flex through work there. You can follow me here.
I’ve always wanted to learn about working on cars so I’ve been helping a buddy restore his grandfather’s 1973 Pontiac Ventura Sprint Custom Hatchback. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of frustration.
I recently made the switch to Vista 64-bit (loving it by the way, 8GB of RAM is most excellent) and it’s been a mostly pain-free conversion. One program that as behaved…curiously…since the upgrade is Flex Builder 3.
Just today I found a bug that seems to affect 64-bit Windows user in the Project Properties dialog. The bug in question is that the “Flex Modules” section of the properties dialog is blank. So there is no way to add or remove modules from the project build. To fix this, open the Properties dialog (Project > Properties), click on “Resources” and resize the window horizontally to be as thin as possible. Then click on “Flex Modules” and resize the window to be usable again and BAM! just like magic the modules appear!
UPDATE
I’ve found that an easier way to do this is just adjust the divider between the list on the left hand side of the dialog and the right hand content area. Just adjusting the divider a smidge will cause everything to magically appear.
I’ve had to reset the font size in Flex Builder a few times now and each time I forget, not because it’d been so long since I’d last changed the font size, but because the setting is buried away, hidden from view.
To change the font size in Flex Builder click Window > Preferences…. In the dialog that pops up click General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts and expand the Basic rollout. In the Basic rollout there are a bunch of options, click Text Font and then click the Change… button that appears. It should be smooth sailing from here.
Previously I discussed the process of implementing a custom chrome in Adobe AIR, with this post I’ll delve into how I created the assets I used in Beer Near Here Desktop. In particular I’ll discuss how I acquired all the beer glass images necessary to create the loading animation for Beer Near Here Desktop.
One of the downsides to creating Rich Internet Applicationss is that they defy the standard methods for interacting with websites — the refresh, back and forward buttons have no real place in an Flex application. As a developer you probably understand that clicking refresh or back is a no-no but you users aren’t likely to be as savvy. This article will describe a method you can employ to prompt users with a confirmation dialog when they attempt to navigate away from you Flex app. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been reading along you’ll know that…I haven’t posted anything in awhile. Hopefully this post will make up for that a bit. Today I’ll be writing about using custom chrome (sometimes called ‘skins’) with AIR. A quick Google search will pull up quite a few resources on this but I noticed that most of them were for Flex 2 which is, apparently, quite different from Flex 3 when it comes to AIR. Also I couldn’t really find a definitive guide that pulled it all together. Maybe this post can remedy this situation.
Doomablo. It certainly has an excellent pedigree.