Comments on: Exploring runtime styling with the Native Window Explorer in Adobe AIR

By: Xu

Xu — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:10:03 +0000

Hi, Justin, This is very useful. I just wonder if you have a newer version of Mac.css and Windows.css to download. Thanks,
Xu

By: Ed Morris

Ed Morris — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:49:09 +0000

2. change this…
techlabs:AppWindow width=”100%” height=”100%” id=”appWindow”

to this…
techlabs:AppWindow width=”100%” height=”100%” id=”appWindow” creationComplete=”setWindow()”

By: Ed Morris

Ed Morris — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:46:53 +0000

one problem I found (already mentioned, but I have an easier fix):

this line:
applicationComplete=”setWindow()”

since techlabs:AppWindow isn’t instantiated by the time applicationComplete fires, any reference to it results in a nullpointer error.

here’s the fix:
1. remove this:
applicationComplete=”setWindow()”

2. change this:

to this:

and all works fine.

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:59:06 +0000

Ian, so what i am understanding is you want an application where by you can update the style of the application without downloading the application. So above there is an example of an embedded style with the default.css that contains the basic style of the components, then there are two dynamic style files for Mac and PC. Depending on your OS it loads different styles. So to take this a step further, when your app checks to see if there is an update available, why not check to see if there is a new skin available – if so download and overwrite the dynamic skin. Your concern seems related to the default.css, which you can just change to dynamic and load one skin in dynamically, download and overwrite the new one and then call a refresh on the StyleManager. Using the StyleManager to apply styles is fully supported by Adobe and is the right way to go.

By: ian pretorius

ian pretorius — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:08:50 +0000

What if you want to add a new skin to your application? You have to update the entire AIR application? Im not to happy with this. I know you can load remote swfs via byte code , but there is a small little indirect “take note” in all Adobe documentation regarding forward compatibility issues of allowLoadBytesCodeExecution which has me worried at the moment about trying to build a application that can have new skins added to it without reinstalling the entire application.