Sti Media: The Source

About to head out to the AIR Seminar here in Vancouver

Well, another hour or so and I'll be taking our crappy transit system to Vancouver to go hang out with the AIR guys. It was supposed to get really really hot today so I had been debating on whether I really wanted to go or not without a nice air (har har) conditioned car but it looks like the high of 37 celsius won't be reached, which is good. I would drive down there but the seminar is right at rush hour.. and that in itself would suck.

So! I'll update with whatever tidbits I get when I make it back. Should be fun.

Put together a couple of tutorials for AIR in Japanese

Just thought I'd post here because I took down my Japanese blog a while back when we changed servers.. and haven't got around to getting it back up.

On the site we manage for Japanese dev/des peeps (MediaCreator.jp) I've managed to get up a couple of AIR tutorials. One is the install procedure for the runtime and SDK and one is making a quick SWF application from a previously made SWF. Pretty much just showing how easy it is to put together apps in AIR.

AIR Category here

Installing AIR and the SDK here

Making an app with the SDK here

Apollo Tip: How to not have the Apollo window controls show up

hmph, it happens almost every time.. You mess with something new, can't figure it out, ask somebody or at somewhere and 5 minutes later.. you've figured it out.

Anyhow, just in case this helps somebody else:

Quick tip on making sure that there are no window controls in your Apollo application.

First thing is to edit your application XML file in the rootContent tag to have the following:

systemChrome="none" transparent="true" visible="true"

Then, and this is key and where I messed up, make sure that your Application tag is not set to mx:ApolloApplication but is instead just set to the normal mx:Application. You then must place in some buttons that will close/minimize the application.

The close function must call this:
stage.window.close();

The minimize function must call this:
stage.window.minimize();

That's it!

Here's a screen shot of mine:

In Apollo, how do you get rid of the Apollo window controls?

I can't figure out for the life of me how the weather app got rid of the controls for the window. As in, the little close and minimize buttons.

I'm working on a small application and I just want it to act like a little widget of some sorts where the whole background is slightly transparent and the content is visible inside that. Then in the corner I would have my own minimize and close buttons.

I've tried everything (I think) and just can't get it to work like I want it. The application always shows the Apollo controls.

I have my application XML file with this in it:
systemChrome="none" transparent="true" visible="true"

and this in my MX:Styles
Application
{
background-color:"";
background-image:"";
padding: 0px;
background-alpha:"0.4";
}

but no go.

I've searched the Apollo forums but it doesn't seem like anybody else has come across this. Any advice?

My first impression of Apollo

Well, it's not like I have a lot of time on my hands but I thought I'd give Apollo a whirl and see how it goes. There's a lot of hype going on at the moment about it and I'm pretty curious to see how it stands up to other swf to exe apps.

Creating apps for Apollo is simple if you already have experience with Flex, which I do. So getting into the application making is a snap. I do have to say that it took me a good 10 minutes to get the icons for the application I made to show up.. Not for any fault of Adobe but my own for not noticing that the tags for the icons were sitting inside a comment block.. duh

Anyhow, once I got over that little hurdle I started to look at the rest a bit and see that the background that Flex puts in is not supported by Apollo. Or something like that because my app has a drab grey background to it when installed. All I made was a basic video player and then just embedded the FLV files in the AIR file. Worked fine.

Something I would like to see in the future would be an uninstall file in the install directory so I don't have to go to the control panel and find it in the programs list to uninstall. I'm on windows, not a mac so I can't just go and delete the directory.

I haven't had any experience yet in trying to get the file object to work or find out how on and off connectivity go, I'll see what I can do tomorrow or the next day. It looks good though, simple to create AIR files and then install. Looking forward to spending a bit more time with Apollo in the near future.