Apr 06 2007
5 Comments
By Roger Braunstein AIR, Flex

Can’t-Wait Apollo Features

by

I was just working on a good way to flexibly manage my application’s document windows in Apollo, and when I started trying to throw real windows up, I ran into a wall. The windowing docs clearly showed an example of adding display objects right into the stage of a NativeWindow, but I wasn’t able to spawn windows with views in them. After banging my head for a while, I found the note cleverly hidden at the very top of the asdocs with a bold “Important”! Those tricky Adobe technical writers. Anyway, you can add in an HTML view, or display objects, but apparently those windows run their own instance of Flash Player: you can’t just add in Flex components. I would be curious to find out if cross-window scripting is also impossible now. I would guess so. I’m guessing that getting a unified Flash Player execution environment across native OS windows in all supported OSes is a challenging hurdle (to say the least).

At least mine eyes did not deceive me about the other feature I really am looking forward to, native menu bar support. This is more of an issue for the Mac platform since menus are already grouped with the main application window in Windoze.


So these two limitations kind of throw a wrench in what I was trying to do… I guess I’ll do the Windows 3.1 thing and have one big window with a window-docked menu, and containing the document windows as children. The document windows and menu will both be standard flex components within the main Apollo window. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next public alpha rev! Hopefully it’s on its way :)

Update: I was thankfully wrong about cross window applications, even in the alpha. Adding Flex components requires a pretty straightforward workaround. Daniel Dura’s approach. Todd Anderson’s approach. Ask (a stupid question) and ye shall receive (an answer from the internets)!

Update: Native window saga part two, part three.

  • http://partlyhuman.com Roger Braunstein

    BTW, you can load in a SWF with Flex in it, but it must exist in its own ApplicationDomain — no interfacing with the rest of your app — unless you use LocalConnection, or, geez, some other kind of horrid workarounds.
    The point is more that you can’t just do myWindow.addChild(new MyBigPanel()); and go.

  • http://custardbelly.com/blog todd anderson

    hey roger,
    I was actually just talking about the same thing – http://custardbelly.com/blog/?p=60. may be of some help… still a workaround though.

  • http://partlyhuman.com Roger Braunstein

    Hi Todd! It looks like the problem isn’t with multiple instances of Flash Player but only with multiple stages, so yay, cross window scripting should be possible! Plus, the workaround seems pretty straightforward. Excellent! I’ll try it out, thank you!

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