AIR-ChromeWindowBlur-ANE

A native extension for Adobe AIR for Mac/OSX development that uses Core Graphics to enhance window SystemChrome option with blur/alpha effects Extension is compiled with XCode 5.1.1 and deployment target is set at 10.8+

What does it do?

Since a lot of folks love to build mobile and desktop applications with Adobe AIR, I found that System Chrome option lacks transparency and if you want transparent window background you have to invest quite a bit of time to write Native Window controls to move/control the window in AS3 due to Chromeless Window approach in AIR where it removes native OS's title bar and you end up with an app that doesn't look as native without it.

With the upcoming arrival of OSX Yosemite, I'm sure a lot of AS3 developers will want their Mac apps to look similar to the native look of the OS, so I created a native extension that overrides some of the properties of AIR Framework and allows Custom Chrome to act as standard System Chrome but with cool visual blurring and transparency effect using Core Graphics API.

How to use it?

I tried to allow developers as much freedom as possible and included options for transparency amount, the blur amount and even the color of the background window to play with.

You just need to get the ANE from this repo, link it with your project and off you go.

FLASH CC/2014 LINKING:

1. Go to Actionscript 3 setting where you would normally include the SWC files.
2. Hit + and point to the location where you placed the ANE to link it.

FLASH BUILDER:

1. Open Project Properties
2. Go to Actionscript Build Path
3. Add SWC file
4. Change the file type to .ANE in the dialog box
5. Locate the ANE and add it.

NOTE: Adobe recommends Link Type for the attached ANEs to be of external type not Merged Into Code.

**IMPORTANT: ** Due to limitations of System Chrome and Chromeless Opaque, you need to use Custom Chrome Transparent option under AIR SDK Settings in order to take advantage of this ANE. The Hardware Acceleration/Render Mode has to be set to AUTO.

Example Usage:

Since we are extending Custom Chrome functionality from AIR framework that doesn't have title bar, I've given you the ability to specify custom title alongside other properties like whether or not you want the window to be closable, resizable, maximizable, minimizable in addition to the actual transcluency adjustment properties.

import com.bozzified.extensions.NativeWinBlur;

// create instance for AIR window Core Graphics awesomeness
var win:NativeWinBlur = new NativeWinBlur();


// set window attributes - always goes before enableWindowBlur()
// ARGUMENTS TO PASS
// hasWindowTitle:Boolean=true, windowTitle:String="", maximizable:Boolean=true, minimizable:Boolean=true, closable:Boolean=true, resizable:Boolean=true

win.setWindowAttributes(true, "Core Graphics AIR Chrome Window Blurred", false, true, true, false);

// set effect properties 
// ARGUMENTS TO PASS
// alpha:Number=0.5, blurAmount:uint=50, red:uint=0, green:uint=0, blue:uint=0
win.enableWindowBlur(0.4, 30, 255, 255, 255);

In Action:

![Image of Example Window] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Bozzified/AIR-ChromeWindowBlur-ANE/master/MacOS-x86/actionPreview.png)

Responsible Use:

It's important to note that even though Core Graphics is GPU accelerated and the blurring and effects are completely native, abusing the Transparency with a lot of heavy animations and stuff will definitely affect the performance. Due to the nature of AIR's runtime the Render Mode and Hardware Acceleration should be set to AUTO as it might cause issues for you and interfere with Core Graphics API.

Planned Additions:

In this release I really didn't have time to enable full screen mode support even though there are native extensions out there that might do it. If people want it, I can definitely include that in and probably expand a bit more on some additions like (native alert dialogs maybe inside your AIR app? :) ). I'm waiting for Yosemite to see what type of integration I can expand but for now, your app will hopefully now look cooler than it ever did before with AIR :)

Bug Reports/Suggestions:

If you find bugs, have issues, or suggestions feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or Google Plus. Twitter: @Bozzified Google Plus: +Boz Bundalo