Hello World (Flex)
I'm not really a big fan of Hello World applications, most of them really aren't all that useful a learning tool but it seems to be the most popular way o introduce people to a new programming language or concept. Not wanting to disappoint all of those Hello World lovers out there I decided to create one for AIR using Flex.
The Designer
Create a new AIR project and then switch over to Design Mode in the Flex Designer. Once you have done that drag a label onto the form and change the text to read "Hello World",
in the properties panel under Style change the font size to 36. You should see something like this:
The four points on the box surrounding the text are anchors, these can be set in three different ways. You can have them anchored, unanchored or centered. The following image shows the selection possibilities:
Click on centered for both the vertical and horizontal anchor points. This will cause the text to remain centered both horizontally and vertically regardless of how the window is resized, and will result in your label looking something like:
The Code
If you now switch to the source code view you will see the code. Still incredibly simple.
<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
<mx:Label text="Hello World!" horizontalCenter="0" fontSize="36" verticalCenter="0"/>
</mx:WindowedApplication>
Nothing you do in your code will affect the title of the application window. In order to get a title for your application window you need to edit the helloWorld-app.xml file that gets automatically built when you create a new AIR application. This file contains a bunch of settings for your application, it is well documented so I won't go through all of it now. The part which interests us for this tutorial is on line 55. You will see a <title/> tag. You need to edit this title tag so that it looks something like: <title>Hello World</title>. Save the file and then re-run your application. You should now see Hello World in the application title bar.
Congratulations you have created your first Adobe AIR Application