Many applications offer context menus associated with the application’s icon. On Windows systems, these menus are located in the system tray. If you’re working on a Mac OS X system, you’ll find these menus in the dock bar. Generally, these menus have shortcuts for the most common functions of the application you’re using. These menus might also contain commands that must be accessible even when the application is minimized or hidden by the desktop.
The AIR runtime allows you to manage and interact with the system tray and dock bar icons of your application. You can define context menus for them. On Microsoft Windows systems, the icons in the system tray don’t have any default context menus, so unless you have a specially prepared menu to display, it won’t provide a context menu. Mac OS X systems, on the other hand, have a default menu for dock bar icons. The menus you create will be added to the default menu provided by the operating system. You can’t modify or remove the default menus provided by the system for dock bar icons.
The application you will create in the next section will run on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Assigning a menu to an application icon
Start by opening the ch06p04.fla file in Flash CS4. The project, like the previous ones, only has an output TextArea. This TextArea will display the messages regarding the status of your application.
The project, as shown in Figure 6-13, displays an icon in the system tray or dock bar of the local system, which is why a symbol has been prepared in the library. The symbol is a movie clip: Application Icon, which represents the way you want to show the application icon. In the Symbol Properties panel, shown in Figure 6-14, the class name of the symbol has been specified: ApplicationIcon . This class name allows you to instantiate the symbol in the library via ActionScript.
Figure 6-13. The stage and Library panel of the ch06p04.fla project
Figure 6-14. The Symbol Properties panel
You access the document class of the Flash project by clicking the Edit class definition icon on the Document Properties panel. Like for the other projects in this chapter, the Flash project has been set up to not declare the variables automatically for the elements on the stage. You’ll have to specify them yourself in the class associated with the project.
The class starts by declaring the namespace and the dependence on external classes, as shown here:
package com.comtaste.foed.essentialair.chapter6
{
import fl.controls.TextArea;
import flash.desktop.DockIcon;
import flash.desktop.NativeApplication;
import flash.desktop.SystemTrayIcon;
import flash.display.BitmapData;
import flash.display.MovieClip;
import flash.display.NativeMenu;
import flash.display.NativeMenuItem;
import flash.display.NativeWindow;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.filesystem.File;
public class Ch06p04 extends MovieClip
{
Then you declare two class properties: one that refers to the component of the TextArea class on the stage of the project, and one to contain the native menu that the application will use:
// onstage components
public var output:TextArea;
// class properties
private var menuRoot:NativeMenu;
