ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Taskbar icons in AIR
Highlighting the taskbar window button
Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
When a window is in the background, you can notify the user that an event of interest related to the window has
occurred. On Mac OS X, you can notify the user by bouncing the application dock icon (as described in “Bouncing the
dock” on page 648). On Windows and Linux, you can highlight the window taskbar button by calling the
notifyUser() method of the NativeWindow instance. The type parameter passed to the method determines the
urgency of the notification:
NotificationType.CRITICAL: the window icon flashes until the user brings the window to the foreground.
NotificationType.INFORMATIONAL: the window icon highlights by changing color.
Note: On Linux, only the informational type of notification is supported. Passing either type value to the
notifyUser() function will create the same effect.
The following statement highlights the taskbar button of a window:
stage.nativeWindow.notifyUser(NotificationType.CRITICAL);
Calling the NativeWindow.notifyUser() method on an operating system that does not support window-level
notification has no effect. Use the NativeWindow.supportsNotification property to determine if window
notification is supported.
Creating windows without taskbar buttons or icons
Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
On the Windows operating system, windows created with the types utility or lightweight do not appear on the taskbar.
Invisible windows do not appear on the taskbar, either.
Because the initial window is necessarily of type, normal, in order to create an application without any windows
appearing in the taskbar, you must either close the initial window or leave it invisible. To close all windows in your
application without terminating the application, set the autoExit property of the NativeApplication object to false
before closing the last window. To simply prevent the initial window from ever becoming visible, add
false to the element of the application descriptor file (and do not set the
visible property to true or call the activate() method of the window).
In new windows opened by the application, set the type property of the NativeWindowInitOption object passed to
the window constructor to NativeWindowType.UTILITY or NativeWindowType.LIGHTWEIGHT.
On Mac OS X, windows that are minimized are displayed on the dock taskbar. You can prevent the minimized icon
from being displayed by hiding the window instead of minimizing it. The following example listens for a
nativeWindowDisplayState change event and cancels it if the window is being minimized. Instead the handler sets
the window visible property to false:
private function preventMinimize(event:NativeWindowDisplayStateEvent):void{
if(event.afterDisplayState == NativeWindowDisplayState.MINIMIZED){
event.preventDefault();
event.target.visible = false;
}
}
If a window is minimized on the Mac OS X dock when you set the visible property to false, the dock icon is not
removed. A user can still click the icon to make the window reappear.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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