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Chapter 1: The Development Environment

The

filename

element reﬂects the name given to the application and is displayed as the value for

‘‘Application name’’ within the installer window. With the optional

programMenuFolder

property set

in the descriptor ﬁle, the ﬁlename will also be displayed within the subpath of the Windows Start ➪

Programs menu.

The

version

attribute is an application-deﬁned designator and does not relate to the version of AIR. Its

value is speciﬁed by the developer, and typically conforms to the standard

MajorVersion.MinorVersion

form. Within this example, the

version

value is

0.1

The

initialWindow

element has various optional child elements pertaining to the properties applied

to the initial application window. Properties, such as positioning and size, are applied as children

of the

initialWindow

node, but most have a default value and are considered optional. The

title

systemChrome

transparent

,and

visible

properties are all optional but are included in this example

with their default values because they are frequently used to customize the visual aspects of your appli-

cation. The only required property of

initialWindow

is the

content

element. The value for

content

the URL of the SWF ﬁle generated when you compile your application.

The

name

description

installationFolder

,and

programMenuFolder

properties are all optional. The

description

value is displayed within the installation window. The

name

value appears in the title of the

installation window; it is the application name available in the uninstall panel and is the name given to

the installation folder. The

installFolder

element’s value speciﬁes the installation location of the appli-

cation within the application directory of your operating system —

Program Files

on Windows and

HD name/Applications

on Mac OS X. The

programMenuFolder

is the subpath displayed in the Windows

Start ➪ Programs menu, where the application can be found under the value of

filename

. This setting

is ignored by any operating system other than Windows. The

installFolder

and

programMenuFolder

property values follow the same character restrictions as the ﬁle and folder naming conventions of your

operating system.

Many more properties can be set in the application descriptor ﬁle that are speciﬁc to the operating system

(such as associated ﬁle types) and the look and feel of your AIR application (such as icons). These are

optional and will be addressed in applications throughout this book.

The second snippet you saved as

HelloWorld.mxml

is your main application ﬁle. This book does not cover

the Flex language and MXML markup, but it does describe additions and changes to the Application

Program Interface (API) that pertains to AIR. A good ﬁrst start is the

WindowedApplication

container:

<mx:WindowedApplication

xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"

layout="vertical"

windowComplete="completeHandler();">

The

WindowedApplication

tag deﬁnes the container for the application. Those familiar with the Flex

language are used to deﬁning

Application

as their application container. In fact,

WindowedApplication

extends the

Application

component. It has extra attributes that can be set in the descriptor ﬁle and

overriddenwithinthistag,aswellasspeciﬁed events and styles unique to

WindowedApplication

.The

windowComplete

event is one such unique event, which is dispatched when the window’s initial layout is

completed and made visible. The

completeHandler()

method within the

<mx:Script>

tag is the handler

for this event. Currently, no operations are performed in this method, but one will be added when the

ADL tool is discussed in the next section.