benwatts.ca » air

App Idea? RUNR!

Ben — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:27:26 +0000

Toying around with the idea of making an AIR app in Flash, since so far all my playing with AIR has involved HTML apps (and I’d really like to try PixelBender out). I spat this out, using my new favourite typeface: Neutraface.

The idea is to track the distance and time of the runs you take so you can see progress or stagnation at a glance.

Come to think of it, it might be a good idea to add “types” of runs. Yeah! Treadmill/Hill/Flat/Fartlek/Track-Sprint/Cross-Country.

Hmm …

Also: desktop background is a lovely photo by this fellow.

Resizable HTML AIR Applications

Ben — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:40:03 +0000

Far easier than I thought it was:

$('#resize').mousedown( function(){
window.nativeWindow.startResize('BOTTOM_RIGHT');
// or: BOTTOM, BOTTOM_LEFT, BOTTOM_RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, TOP, TOP_LEFT, TOP_RIGHT, NONE
});

You can retrieve the width of the application using the width property of nativeWindow (so:

window.nativeWindow.width

). It might be a good idea to prevent your app from getting too small and using scrollbars.

From a development standpoint, with this in mind I guess the idea would be to set the default width of the app in the application descriptor file and then use percentage-widths while styling to keep the app flexible. Ta-da!

AIR & Webkit

Ben — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:15:03 +0000

I’ve fallen in love with how AIR uses Webkit as its HTML rendering engine. It means you get to use fun things like:

div{
   background-color: rgba(195,100,50,0.5); }