This is something so simple but it took me hours to figure it out (actually I do not know why): I wanted to remove the status bar from my Adobe Air application window. I use Flex Builder to develop my Air application.

I wanted to remove the status bar in the bottom of the window because it is useless and it looks bad in fullscreen mode.

As standard MXML element Flex Builder uses the mx:WindowedApplication. You just have to add a simple
showStatusBar="false"
and you get rid of that stupid status bar.

[Update 8. April 2009]
Setting
showStatusBar="false"
just causes the status bar to not being displayed. However, it is still there but not visible.

Thus, I added
windowComplete="removeStatusBar(event);"
in the title tag of WindowedApplication and implemented removeStatusBar(event) as following:

private function removeStatusBar(event:AIREvent):void{
removeChild(statusBar);
}

Recently, I needed an image reflection effect in Flex. This would not be complicated to achieve for a Loader image object in Flash Actionscript 3 but the more for Flex as everything needs to be a bit more complicated in Flex when it comes to customizing.

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This article from Kevin Hoyt’s blog has been a hell of a lot useful for me. It describes how thumbnails can be generated on the fly of high-res images with Adobe Air and how they can be saved to HD.

As some code is missing in Kevin’s tutorial, here is the code of two Adobe Air thumbnail generation applications.

This video presents the results of the Bachelor thesis of Frederic Friess at the Vislab of the Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences. I have been Frederic’s mentor under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Doerner for this work.
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I helped Sensory Minds to build an interactive multi-touch and tangible media installation for a Werkschau of students from the Hochschule Pforzheim. Graduates are represented by objects that are provided with a fiducial on the underside and a picture of the work on the upper side. As soon as the object is added to the table, pictures of the student’s projects will be loaded and circularly arranged around the object. Those pictures can be browsed via multi-touch. If a user taps on a project picture all pictures to this project will be loaded and will be arranged on a second circle around the project images.
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This video demonstrates the fundamental multi-touch functions of Vispol. The demonstrated functions contain the creation and modification of persons and objects and connections. Additionally, examples for the application of the layout functions in Vispol are being introduced.

Click here for further information about Vispol.

You can try out the mouse version of Vispol here.

Today I had the problem that i needed to create a Flex element by hand and apply to it a width of 100%.

This goes as easy with MXML as this
<mx:VBox id="wrapperBox"><mx:UIComponent width="100%" height="100%" id="elementXYZ"></mx:VBox>

But you cannot code this to achieve the adding programatically with Actionscript:
var elementXYZ:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
elementXYZ.width = "100%";
elementXYZ.height = "100%";
wrapperBox.addChild(elementXYZ);

Instead, you have to use this:
var elementXYZ:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
elementXYZ.percentWidth = 100;
elementXYZ.percentHeight = 100;
wrapperBox.addChild(elementXYZ);

I’ve got a list of points in my database, which I want to show neatly in a Google Maps Flash Map.

Thus, I …

1. calculate the bounding box around these points
2. calculate the center of this bounding box
3. set the zoom level of the map in a way that the zoomed cutout contains all points
4. set the center of the map

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//1.
var bounds:LatLngBounds = new LatLngBounds();
for each(var mapObject in tripMessages){
    var currentLatLon:LatLng = new LatLng(mapObject.latitude, 
	                                       mapObject.longitude);
    bounds.extend(currentLatLon);
}
 
//2.
var center:LatLng = bounds.getCenter();
 
//3.
map.setZoom(map.getBoundsZoomLevel(bounds));
 
//4.
map.setCenter(center);

I use my code in both an Adobe Flex and in an Adobe Air application. As I want to use the native menus of Adobe Air I want to prevent that my self-built menu is being added to the Air application. Thus, I need to figure out if the code is running in a Flex or in an Air application. I do this by using the following structure:

var airApp:Boolean = false;
try{
if(NativeApplication.nativeApplication) airApp = true;
}catch(error:Error){}
if(!airApp){
addChild(generalMenuSprite);
}


In this post I’ll show how to save a file from AS3 to your local HD. In another post I’ve explained how to load a file from HD to Flash.

For a project I’ve been looking around for a decent solution to the problem of saving a text file (to be more precise XML file) from Actionscript 3 to my local harddisc but i couldn’t find a solution for this (what not necessarily means that there is none).

Saving and loading can be smoothly achieved with Adobe Air but not with Flash because Flash has been designed to run on the web. However, it is possible to download and upload files via AS3 on and from your HD to and from a webserver. Think of an Flash MP3 shop: You can click on an MP3 in Flash and you will be asked where to save the file and afterwards the file is being downloaded to the chosen location on your HD. So it must be somehow possible.

Additionally, it is possible to create XML or other text in Flash and store it on a webserver and vice versa.

Thus I came upon following solution:

Figure 1: Howto save and load text files with AS3