Serge Jespers

The AIR2 release is just around the corner and one of my favorite new features is the ability to use native scripts. As I’ve already demonstrated earlier, this is extremely powerful and here’s another good example.

From the moment AIR was released, a lot of developers were asking for Growl support to add toast style notifications. Up until now, there hasn’t really been an easy and flexible solution so most developers opted to build their own notifications. I really like Growl and the fact that you as a user have total control over the look and feel. I use the Mono style created by Christopher Lobay. It’s probably the sexiest toast style notification I’ve ever used.

With AIR 2 you can now call Growl right from within your application. I actually call the Growlnotify command-line tool, which comes as an extra in the Growl download. Most people probably don’t install these extras but that’s no problem. I can bundle the command-line tool as part of my application and call it directly from my applicationDirectory.

So… How does this work? It’s actually extremely easy… The first thing you do is set up a new File object that points to the Growlnotify tool.

var file:File = File.applicationDirectory;
file = file.resolvePath("growlnotify");

As I am going to bundle growlnotify with my application it will just be installed as part of the app and thus resides in applicationDirectory.

The next thing I have to do is set up a NativeProcessStartupInfo object. That’s where I’ll store the basic information that is used to start our NativeProcess.

var nativeProcessStartupInfo:NativeProcessStartupInfo = new NativeProcessStartupInfo();
var processArgs:Vector.<String> = new Vector.<String>();
processArgs[0] = "-n";
processArgs[1] = "My AIR application";
processArgs[2] = "-p";
processArgs[3] = "0";
processArgs[4] = "-t";
processArgs[5] = "Your Growl title";
processArgs[6] = "-m";
processArgs[7] = "Your Growl message";
processArgs[8] = "-a";
processArgs[9] = "Adobe AIR Application Installer";
nativeProcessStartupInfo.arguments = processArgs;
nativeProcessStartupInfo.executable = file;

In this case, I’m also adding a bunch of arguments in my NativeProcessStartupInfo object. These arguments will be passed on to the growlnotify command-line tool. In this example, I’m setting up the name of my application, the notification priority, the title and message of my notification and I’m also telling it to use the icon associated with the Adobe AIR Application Installer. (Check out the Growlnotify docs for more info on these settings)

Next and last step is to actually call the native script.

process = new NativeProcess();
process.start(nativeProcessStartupInfo);

This code above will result in this Growl notification:

The only downside of using native scripts is that you’ll have to package your application specifically for the operating system you wrote your native script for. So in this case, I’d have to package it as a .DMG file since Growl only exists on OS X. That said, I really wouldn’t mind an OS X version of TweetDeck that allows me to use Growl instead of their custom notifications…

I really can’t wait to see what you guys are going to build with AIR 2! You can already start today! Check out Adobe Labs for more information!