The best way to showcase a powerful new technology is to demonstrate its real-world results, and that's exactly what this new Cookbook does with Adobe AIR.

Wide ranging and highly practical, AIR 1.5 Cookbook contains more than 100 proven recipes for developing AIR applications. You'll find everything from AIR basics, to solutions for working with the embedded SQLite database, to tips on updating and distributing AIR applications.

You also get ideas from the development community. Through its AIR cookbook website, Adobe invited AIR developers to post their own solutions for working with this technology, and from hundreds of posts, the authors chose the best and most useful solutions to supplement Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook.

The Adobe AIR Cookbook is for intermediate developers who already have an understanding of their specific development environment. That means Flash and Flex developers need to already have a good understanding of ActionScript 3. It also means that JavaScript developers need to have a working knowledge of the language. Every recipe in this book contains code for each development environment and provides a solution to a common problem, explains how and why it works, and offers sample code that you can put to use immediately. Topics include:

• AIR basics
• Application settings
• Application windows
• Screens
• HTML content
• PDF support
• Clipboard support
• Drag and drop support
• Filesystem integration
• Embedded SQL database programming
• Encrypted local store
• Application and window native menus
• Taskbar and dock integration
• File types
• Service monitor framework
• Application updates
• AIR application distribution with the browser API

Whether you're a committed AIR developer or still evaluating the technology, you'll discover how to get quick results with AIR 1.5 using the recipes in this Cookbook. It's an ideal way to jumpstart your next HTML/Ajax, Flex, or Flash application built on AIR.

The printed book is available through most major online and retail bookstores worldwide, and can be read online at Safari Books Online. For more information visit the O'Reilly store.

Copyright © 2009 David Tucker, Marco Casario, Koen De Weggheleire, and Rich Tretola. All rights reserved.

Applications and native window menus

Operating systems provide facilities for creating menus; these menus are called native menus. Adobe AIR supports working with native menus, and the recipes in this chapter show you how to build several types of native menus. At this writing, AIR supports application, window, context, and pop-up menus. Application and window menus serve the same purpose but on different platforms. Specifically, window menus are available only on Windows, and application menus are available only on Macs. Computer users are familiar with the typical native menus, so the usability of your AIR application improves a lot when you offer users application or window menus.

Download the complete chapter

Chapter 12: Application and native window menus (PDF, 312K)

 

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