Table of contents for air-tip

1. AirTip: Problem with app.xml in Flex 3
2. AirTip: AIR application gained focus
3. AirTip: List all of your drives in AIR application
4. Adobe AIR 1.5 available in Flex SDK Nightly builds
5. AIR Tip: ContextMenuItem can crash AIR app on Windows
6. AIR Tip: Flash movie is not rendered in AIR 1.5 HTML in Fullscreen

This is long title, but it can tells everything. I came up interesting issue. I do not know if you have already played with new AIR 1.5. We need some new features, so we have used it. And found interesting issue. If you are using HTML compoment and want to load HTML pages with Flash content inside it works in normal mode. But if your application is in Fullscreen, Flash movies are not loaded. In context menu (right click) there is just written Movie is not loaded… If i press Esc and go away from Fullscreen mode, Flash is loaded and all works correctly. Hmmm, strange. Does anyone experience same problem? Can someone from Adobe tell me anything about this.

Sorry, if I can’t see anything obvious…

I hope this will help to anyone…

If you are interested in similar Flex / AIR / Flash Tips & Tricks, consider subscribe to my Franto.com Tips & Tricks.

ATTENTION!

Tyler pointed me to the Marc’s Musings Blog, where Marc Hughes has experienced same problems, and it is confirmed by Adobe AIR Engineers, that this is bug. It’s already submitted in Adobe Bug tracking system.

Here are Marc’s posts:

• AIR Full screen & hosted swf content in HTML control
• Confirmation from Adobe AIR Engineers, that’s the bug

Table of contents for air-tip

1. AirTip: Problem with app.xml in Flex 3
2. AirTip: AIR application gained focus
3. AirTip: List all of your drives in AIR application
4. Adobe AIR 1.5 available in Flex SDK Nightly builds
5. AIR Tip: ContextMenuItem can crash AIR app on Windows
6. AIR Tip: Flash movie is not rendered in AIR 1.5 HTML in Fullscreen

This is just quick tip for all AIR developers. If you are developing AIR application and you want to use ContextMenu please be aware of possible problem on Windows platform. This is not problem on Mac, and it’s not problem in Flash Player (even on Windows). It is problem just in AIR on Windows (at least what I have find out till now).

Problem is as follow:

You want to have ContextMenu for some of your item (right click menu). You have created ContextMenu and want to add ContextMenuItem in this way

var myItem:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem(myItemName);

if variable myItemName is initialized or at least is empty string, all is ok. But there can situations when it is null. For example when you want to support multilanguage with ResourceManager, so it’s not correctly fill up and it’s null. In that case you AIR will crash and you will not know why, because it’s works on Mac, it works in FlashPlayer (without AIR), it just doesn work in AIR on Windows platform

So my quick fix was create fix function, like this

private function fixEmptyString(val:String):String
{
	if (val == null)
		return '';
 
	return val;
}
 
var myItem:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem(fixEmptyString(myItemName));

This will for sure.

Hope this helps you.

P.S. I will post this and another useful AIR tips in my Franto.com Tips & Tricks, so do not wait and subscribe to my list, if you find AIR tip this useful…

Table of contents for air-tip

1. AirTip: Problem with app.xml in Flex 3
2. AirTip: AIR application gained focus
3. AirTip: List all of your drives in AIR application
4. Adobe AIR 1.5 available in Flex SDK Nightly builds
5. AIR Tip: ContextMenuItem can crash AIR app on Windows
6. AIR Tip: Flash movie is not rendered in AIR 1.5 HTML in Fullscreen

Adobe AIR 1.5 with codename Cosmo is available in Flex SDK Nightly builds. There are include almost all features with Flash Player 10, 5 new languages supported, Integration of the SquirrelFish JavaScript VM into the Webkit HTML engine (should provide significant improvements to JavaScript execution), fixed bugs and many more…

Mike Chambers got more information.

Table of contents for air-tip

1. AirTip: Problem with app.xml in Flex 3
2. AirTip: AIR application gained focus
3. AirTip: List all of your drives in AIR application
4. Adobe AIR 1.5 available in Flex SDK Nightly builds
5. AIR Tip: ContextMenuItem can crash AIR app on Windows
6. AIR Tip: Flash movie is not rendered in AIR 1.5 HTML in Fullscreen

This is quick Air Tip: If you need get list of all of your drives in code, just use

var list:Array = File.getRootDirectories();

It list all of y our hard drives with CD ROM drives. But if CD is inserted in CD ROM drive, it will be listed as well. I don’t find way how to find out if drive is CD ROM drive, you can just search for files on that inserted CD.

If there is a way how to find out, if drive is CD ROM drive, let us know

Table of contents for air-tip

1. AirTip: Problem with app.xml in Flex 3
2. AirTip: AIR application gained focus
3. AirTip: List all of your drives in AIR application
4. Adobe AIR 1.5 available in Flex SDK Nightly builds
5. AIR Tip: ContextMenuItem can crash AIR app on Windows
6. AIR Tip: Flash movie is not rendered in AIR 1.5 HTML in Fullscreen

This is little AIR Tip: if you want to know when your AIR application gained focus, just listen to AIREvent.APPLICATION_ACTIVATE.

addEventListener(AIREvent.APPLICATION_ACTIVATE, handleApplicationActivate);

Table of contents for air-tip

1. AirTip: Problem with app.xml in Flex 3
2. AirTip: AIR application gained focus
3. AirTip: List all of your drives in AIR application
4. Adobe AIR 1.5 available in Flex SDK Nightly builds
5. AIR Tip: ContextMenuItem can crash AIR app on Windows
6. AIR Tip: Flash movie is not rendered in AIR 1.5 HTML in Fullscreen

So this is first tip for AIR development (See my FlexTips). I came across bug in Flex 3 Beta. It’s strange. I was playing with App-app.xml file to try change chrome and transparency.

If you have systemChrome=”standard”, transparency must be set to false, if you have systemChrome=”none”, you can set transparency to true. And now problem. Try to set systemChrome=”standard” but have transparent=”true”. After compiling there is error: “Unknown error generating output application.xml files”. You can set systemChrome and transparent parameters back to correct values, you will not get rid of this error. After surfing I have find, that there is because of some invisible chars in the app.xml file. I was trying to remove them, but I can’t see any invisible chars. I have tried to delete file, and copy another working app.xml from working AIR project. Nothing.

The only way how I clear the error was by creating new AIR project, and copy all files from old project except app.xml. I use the new one.

Hope this help someone.

May this will help you:
I wanted to delete this project, and in bin folder there were app.xml which was used by Windows and can be delete, and there were wrong line:

So it seems, when you will have this error in your project, you have to delete or fix file in bin directory, not in source directory.
And when I wanted to switch off the computer, there were process which can be killed (flex 3), so I have to reset the computer.

This should help