Mrinal Wadhwa » Titanium http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com en route to a richer Internet Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:30:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Using Titanium to do things AIR can’t do … http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com/2009/03/23/titanium-air/ http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com/2009/03/23/titanium-air/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:58:00 +0000 Mrinal Wadhwa http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com/?p=834 Adobe AIR is a extraordinary platform and the core idea behind AIR i.e enabling web developers to build desktop apps has been revolutionary. But, there are things about AIR that are very limiting as a developer … many real world applications need much more interaction with the desktop than AIR allows, yes Adobe has valid security related reasons not to allow this but once users allow you to install an application on their desktop they expect features that AIR doesn’t allow you to implement … not being able to do trivial things like .. launch a file in its default application or register a global keyboard shortcut is sometimes frustrating and has led to developers putting together things like The Merapi Project .. which quite frankly is a hack to work around the core problem .. inextensibility of AIR as a platform.

Titanium

This is exactly why Titanium, although very new and not entirely mature, is extremely interesting as an option to deploy desktop applications developed using web technologies. Titanium has this concept of Modules that allows you to extend the run time in any which way you like. Besides that, Titanium, just with the bundled in set of modules, is much more friendly with the desktop and has features like invoking applications, starting and controlling processes etc.

I’ve built a simple Application Launcher as an example that uses Flex/Flash as the front-end technology and Titanium as a runtime. Launcher can be used to launch any application that is installed on your system .. this is something that cannot be built with AIR.

Launcher

Here’s the source ..

Just like several other times when dealing with ExternalInterface Abdul’s Javascript MXML Tag was very useful.

Compiled Distributable for OSX

(I haven’t compiled the Linux and Windows versions since Jeff Haynie told me on IRC that Titanium is releasing PR3 today that will allow cross platform compilation from any one platform .. so i will post the other distributables tomorrow)

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