Question

I can’t seem to work out how to enable icons in the AIR Debug Launcher. This seems to work on Linux, but when I run it on Windows or Mac only the Adobe AIR icon shows. I have specified the location of the icon in <icon></icon> in the application descriptor file.

Answer 1

Those icons are created from the file references in the application descriptor file when the application installs itself so you won’t really be able to see them during development.

There is a solution available on Christian Cantrell’s Adobe blog that works around this though the instructions are from February 2008. This may or may not work with the latest Flex SDK or Flex/Flash Builder IDE.

Fortunately, I’ve found an easy way to make this work. Here’s what you do:

1. Make a copy of your application icon and name it something different. One version should be referenced by your application descriptor file, and the other will be compiled into your application. (You don’t technically have to make a copy of the icon, but when generating a release build of your application, Flex Builder doesn’t copy over embedded resources which means your application icon will be missing. Trust me when I tell you that it’s easier to create a copy and avoid this whole issue.)

2. Compile the copy of your application icon into your application using code like this:
   [Embed(source="assets/application.png")] public var appIconClass:Class;

3. In your application’s initialization code, create a Bitmap instance of your icon like this:
   var appIcon:Bitmap = new appIconClass();

4. Set your icon like this:
   InteractiveIcon(NativeApplication.nativeApplication.icon).bitmaps = [appIcon];

This code is a little oversimplified because it doesn’t take platform differences into account. A more complete implementation might do something like this:

1. Check to see what kinds of icons the client supports. You can do this with the NativeApplication.supportsDockIcon and NativeApplication.supportsSystemTrayIcon APIs.

2. Scale the Bitmap to the appropriate dimensions for the platform.

3. Set the icon(s) using the NativeApplication’s icon property.