I am working on Adobe Air application. Everything about coding and configuration have been good so far but I have some major road blocks down the road:
1. Schedule my application to run at certain time.
2. Run the application in the System Tray like a Daemon app
Does Adobe support for configuring the application to run in System Tray like a Gmail notifier app now? If it does, is it possible for me to have it configure for both Windows and Mac systems?
If anyone has any pointers or tips, please feel free to let me know. Thanks in advance.
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This isn’t a configuration that AIR supports.
You can automatically start an AIR app at login. You can put an icon into the Windows system tray and run without windows. But you cannot, AFAIK, run as a service. Mac app bar icons are not supported, either.
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I see. I learned how to Start at login recently. It was a blast. Could you offer more hints on how to have icon at system tray and run without windows? I only got to Air for 2 days and are only able to build an application to load proper GUI and run at login so far. Need to demo the idea as soon as Friday so I have prototyping on air, c# and cocoa in order to find a daemon solution that works on both systems and make a demonstration.
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There’s a class for adding the icon and menu to the Sytsem tray. Here are some links:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/quickstart/articles/stopwatch_doc k_system_tray.html
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d118676a4a f7-8000.html
Note there is also a new extension feature, which allows you to extend AIR with native code and could be used for such things as Mac app bar icons. (I don’t think it would let you make a windows service with AIR, though.)
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I found example online here about using Apache Procrun to configure Air app, http://blog.magicalhobo.com/2010/10/08/running-an-air-app-as-a-service -on-windows/
Have you looked into that? I haven’t tried it yet.
About the extention feature, do you mean that I can have a C# app loading the Air executable?
If pure Air app is not an option for cross-platform services, I’m thinking of making a native service that would load up the Air app with a menu click. That way, I can still keep the native code programming to minimal without having to remake my web app.
I found ways to make a Windows Service in C#, but I haevn’t figured out the Mac Daemon yet . I’m looking into that with a friend who’s an Cocoa expert.
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I haven’t seen that blog post. You are free to try it, but since it isn’t supported you are kind of on your own.
The extension feature allows you to write a library in C (the C code can access C#) and access functions defined in that library from ActionScript. C# should be able to invoke an AIR application without this feature, just as it would invoke any other program.
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That’s an interesting feature. Does Adobe have documentation on that extention feature?
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http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/extensions/index.html
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Last night I got some time to try out your example from “Working with the dock and the system tray”
It is really impressive to see how easy you can animate the icon on the taskbar, but it doesn’t particularly achieve my goal to have a cross-platform taskbar app running. 
I tried to work with Java yesterday and got their Taskbar module working on both platforms. It solves the basic issue. But then I realize Java is missing the Webkits Adobe Air is offering. So I need two Apps in order to achieve the goal to re-use my web app on the desktop. Now I am considering to learn more about the extend feature you mentioned to let the Java application works like a remote control for the Air application’s instances.
So here are some of my current concerns: is it possible to be able to have input from java app into air application’s elements? Does Adobe’s intergrated runtime support incorporating Java as part of the app like it does with SWF and javascript? Or is there any bridge I can use to have the two applications communicate with one another?
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The native extension feature uses C on desktop platforms. (You can use Java, but only if you use JNI to call the extesnision C API.)
The way that this works is that you create an ActionScript library that essentially defines the API for the feature to your AIR application code. This library has a mechanism for calling functions in the native code implementation. So the extension looks like any other ActionScript library to the application.
I wouldn’t really describe this as “Java C acting as a remote control for the AIR application’s instances.” There aren’t separate applications here. One is a library.
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