Comments on: Active Desktop replacement with Adobe AIR

By: sreekumar

sreekumar — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:10:14 +0000

Thanx Brain!!!
You are the man!!!
you saved my time…

By: enko

enko — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:11:01 +0000

Excellent solution ! .
but one thing … I am trying to create a menu in our LIGHTWEIGHT widow’
but no success

By: brian

brian — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:04:44 +0000

To follow up, I was able to figure a way out to reproduce this functionality using Flash Builder 4 — and it also negates the need to use AutoHotKey (which is an awesome app to know about–thanks!!). Here is how it works:

Create a new AIR app (for which an taskbar icon is required). This app spawns a new application component based on mx:Window with the HTMLLoader in it. I used a separate component for this so it could function independently from the main app. Child apps in AIR do *not* require an icon so you can set the type=NativeWindowType.LIGHTWEIGHT on this new component when you open it. As soon as this new window opens it dispatches a complete event. The main app listens for the complete event and then closes itself — taking the taskbar icon with it. Since (I believe) in Windows 7 the shortcut “Windows/M” works from the items in the task bar, the fact that the child app is not in the task bar prevents it from being minimized by the shortcut.

By the way, this seems to work only on Windows — not Mac — so a different solution would be required for that.

Thanks for the starting point on on this solution!

By: brian

brian — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:34:21 +0000

This is really great but I tried to reproduce it and am still getting the icon of the AIR app appearing in the taskbar. Is there a special way to remove the icon?

By: Mconn

Mconn — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:50:00 +0000

It seems you’re still leaving a gap for the icons to the left you said. Is there anyway to get this to fit the full screen, under the desktop icons, like in active desktop?

By: d-a-m

d-a-m — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:53:29 +0000

You should find an airaliases.js file in your SDK which provides several factory shortcuts to reduce typing. Just include it, and you’ll have things go like:

air.NativeWindowInitOptions = window.runtime.flash.display.NativeWindowInitOptions;

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:27:45 +0000

Excellent article, I have been looking for just this kind of solution. I am currently running flex builder 3, and would like to do what you are talking about. The syntax is clearly compatible but i cannot call ‘air.NativeWindowInitOptions()’ for example. What do i need to build your samples, and/or can i get the full source code including imports?