I've got the Adobe Apollo runtime up and running and have been fooling around with it for a few hours now. What I like about it is that I can make desktop applications with web-based technologies. However, by using Textmate as my editor instead of the Flex one, it seems I am at a disadvantage.
The first main problem I've had it transparency. There are 2 main things to set to cause window transparency: the "systemChrome" and "transparent" attributes. I've followed the instructions on Adobe's documentation about how to cause window transparency but it's still opaque! Oh well, I'm probably missing something as I know I'm supposed to put...
<mx:Style>
Application {
background-color:"";
background-image:"";
}
</mx:Style>
...but this is supposed to go in a .mxml file or something which I don't know how to properly format. I tried doing it earlier but it made no difference so I assume I'm doing something wrong.
Another thing that I've noticed is that some awkward things show up when javascript is doing its stuff when there are slight problems in the code (haha, think of it as a small bug in the js that just gives you a different result than expected in a browser but gives you some freaky stuff when in Apollo) and that the javascript engine tends to be generally slower. For no real reason I'm making a javascript windowing system within Apollo (redundant, I know) but I just want to get used to working with it. When I compare how the script works in Firefox to how it works in Apollo, there is a noticeable difference.
One really nice thing about Apollo is that I don't need to care about browser compatibility. It's very convenient and dramatically cuts down in overall code size.
All in all, I've only spent a few hours with it and admittedly I've only touched the surface in terms of its Javascript abilities. I haven't ventures into anything to do with window.runtime.*, of which I'm looking forward to exploring, nor have I done anything with Flash, Actionscript, and it. I have a feeling that I will end up really liking Apollo once I work past some of the preliminary issues / learning curve. I'm also really tired now so I think I started rambling somewhere up above.
- Uncategorized by Peter Goodman on Apr 4, 2007 @ 11:25pm
