Kevin Hoyt

During the AIR Europe Tour event in Brussels, Belgium I was approached by an attendee with a technical question. He wanted to drag and drop video content from the desktop (or presumably other source), and drop it into his application. After the drop operation, he wanted to size the native window to fit the specific content size. This might initially sound pretty easy, but it requires accounting for the OS-specific chrome. There are also some usability questions to consider.
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Many of my Adobe AIR demonstrations show the concept of “script briding” between JavaScript and Flash libraries (i.e. SWC files). Using this feature, JavaScript developers can leverage existing work done by Flash developers in areas that were previously not feasible in the browser. It’s important to recognize however, that the Flash Player itself ships with extensive built in functionality that may be useful as well. I wanted to explore this concept a little further, so I put together a little example that leverages PlotKit and Flash Media Server.
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En route between Madrid, Spain and Paris, France, Lee Brimelow and I got into a somewhat philosophical conversation around why the HTML features are important to Flash developers. The obvious standout is in being able to render HTML content in all its glory. Is there anything beyond that though? What about the script-bridge feature? Being able to reach into the HTML DOM and manipulate it from JavaScript? What we came up with was a visually interesting, if not entirely useful example.
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