Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

For those of you who have not heard, Adobe Air represents a fantastic advance in web development technologies. By using the HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the standard bread and butter for web developers, you can leverage those existing skills to create fully fledged desktop applications. Complete with standard OS install, uninstall procedures, custom taskbar(XP)/dock(Mac) icons, the works!

No messing around with C and MFC ( the horror!! ) when developing WinXP apps any more. Plus an Adobe Air app is platform independent. You can build an Adobe Air app and it will run on any OS that has the Adobe Air runtime installed. And what’s more, the Runtime Install procedure is the thing to behold too for it will install painlessly the first time you decide to download an Air app.

Adobe Air will change the way we understand the web, and continue to blur the line between the OS and the browser. It’s my guess for web technology of the year.

While this worked on the *nix os, it resulted in a corrupt binary file when run in WINXP.

Solution

To create a binary file in ruby you will need to include the “wb” option. See below.

Bye!

If you ‘re the same you can download a simple Adobe Air application I put together with the Remember The Milk website inserted in an iframe. Plus a little extra.

Why bother

Doing web development work my browsers and WinXP taskbar can get messy. In a typical setup, I’ll have Firefox running(with several tabs), Internet Explorer 7, possibly 6 too, an IDE EG Aptana Studio or Editplus, probably a few explorer folders and 4 console windows too.

Yes messy I know.

Now you can imagine what that taskbar looks like, and in the midst of this boiling cauldron, in a Firefox tab will lurk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/. It can be a pain to find it.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could keep the http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ seperate from the rest of the Firefox tabs? Perhaps with a distinctive easy to locate icon too.

Ideally I would have http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ running in system tray, not visible in the taskbar and it would disappear back to the system tray when I minimise it, waiting ready to be restored again at short notice…. if only…..

Da Ding!!

Here it is….

BTW the systemtray feature is WinXP only. Perhaps a dock version will appear shortly

It’s called the wordpress-order-pages-plugin.

I’ve found this plugin useful when to allow me to control the order of my Wordpress pages when using my wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin .

It provides a visual layout of your pages and you can change the menu order easily. Very nice.

1. Download Subversion for WINXP
2. Instruction on installing and using Subversion

To get up to speed you should find the following tutorials useful, the first 2 deal with the rails 2 method of creating a basic depot application while along the way showcasing the new features of Rails2.

http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/12/rolling-with-rails-2-0-the-first-full-tutorial

http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/12/rolling-with-rails-2-0-the-first-full-tutorial-part-2

I’ve also found this next PDF informative. It costs 9 dollars but for that you get 140 odd pages of Rails2 goodness that should fill the void until they get around to updating “”Agile Web Development with Rails”

It contains the extra features requested:

• Order the pages yourself by using the Page menu order feature.
• Put a link into into the menu for you blog.
• Works with javascript turned off.
• Make the the parent of a drop down menu clickable or not.
• Find out more at my original post.

Enjoy!

Hi all,
I’m afraid the commenting on this blog is not working at present.

In the meantime if you would like to contact me feel free to email me at weeatbricks@gmail.com

Thanks
Jamie

• Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you Wordpress blog
• Slick JQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.
• Works with javascript turned off.
• Auto highlight of the current page you are are on.
• New features in v.02
• Add a link to your blog to the navigation menu.
• Arrange the order of the page to suit your needs.
• Parents pages can can be either links to pages or not if required.

I wrote this plugin to provide my wordpress blog with a navigation or menu that provides drop down menus or sub navigation menus where you need them.

This plugin uses the cross browser JQuery javascript framework for the sliding down menus and JQuery is installed with the plugin.

Each ‘Page’ of your wordpress blog becomes a link in the new navigation bar. Pages that are ‘children’ populate the drop menu of the parent ‘Page’.

For example. You might have a page titled About. You can then set or create pages such as contact us, team, location or whatever and set the parent of each of these pages to ‘About’.

In your new navigation menu hover over the ‘About’ link and a dropdown menu containing contact us, team, location appears.

I’ve tested this on Wordpress version 2.31 and above. It will not work on version 2.0.x as these version does not support the concept of parent and child pages.

Try out the Demo

Installation

Download wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin here

Simply unzip the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu.zip and copy the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu directory into your ./wp-content/plugins directory.

Login to the WordPress Admin Interface and enable the PlugIn in the PlugIn section.

Next put the tag below somewhere inside one of your wordpress template files.
That’s it.

Usage

Example:
Insert this somewhere into one of your templates, eg header.php

<?php
echo wp_jquery_dropdownmenu(2, “Blog”,1, 0);
?>

This is the default dropdown menu configuration. If you would like to learn about how you can alter your dropmenu further please read the following:

There are four settings to consider.

The first value(2 in the above example):
0 - does not put a link to you blog into the dropdown menu.
1 - Put a lnk to your blog on the left hand side of the dropdown menu.
2 - put a link to your blog in the right hand side of the navigation menu.

Second value (”blog” in the above example):
If you would like a lin to you blog to appear in your dropdown menu. Put the text here. In the above example “Blog” is used and will probably do for most people.

Third value (1 in the above example):
0 - pages will by sorted by their ID
1 - pages will be arranged accorded to their menu order. The menu order can be set in the pages section of your wordpress blog.

Fourth value (0 in the above example):
0 - if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to be unavailable for clicking.
1 - if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to to click to it’ page.

Further notes

You can style the css by editing the files styles.css in the plugins/wp_jquery_dropdownmenu folder

Comments, questions or suggestions most welcome!

Enjoy.

I’ve added two enchantments:

• Updated the version of JQuery from 1.0.3 to 1.2.1
• Added support for wordpress blogs that do not reside in the root directory for a domain. For example, the previous plugin would work if your blog lives at www.mylovelyhorse.com but not www.mylovelyhorse.com/blog/. Now it does.

Download here

Enjoy!