I’ve been working on Dwarf over the past few days and decided it’s time to give a little introduction on its key features. Be sure to view fullscreen with no scaling to see it at 100%. The prerelease of Dwarf available to download on GitHub and the source code is hosted there as well. I’ll be rolling out the official 1.0 build pretty soon—I just need to add a few more key features.

This past week, I spent my spare time writing the SpellCheckHighlighter class. It allows non-Flex developers to use Adobe’s spellchecker, Squiggly, which only provides a UI for Flex components. Currently, SpellCheckHighlighter includes a number of additional settings like underline type and color. I’ve provided a screencast of the demo app below and the source code can be found on GitHub.

Please note, the volume on this screencast is a low because it was recorded at about 8 a.m. and everyone wasn’t awake yet.

I felt like working on something new this past weekend, so I devoted a few hours to the new AIR 2.0 Beta. One feature that really caught my eye is the NativeProcess class, which allows developers to communicate with the system through an executable. This is a game-changer in the AIR world, opening more doors than you or I can ever imagine. I’ve always wanted screen capture support in AIR, so with this new class, I developed it myself.

Surprisingly, my efforts proved successful!—I had a working class, ScreenCapture, and application, ScreenCaptureDemo, up and running within a few hours. Tired of staring at the Spark components, I decided to add a touch of DT to the app by designing my own skin. This took far longer than the core of the app, but made a world of difference. Now that I think of it, this could be considered my first Flex app.

The downside of the NativeProcess class is it nulls the cross-platform benefit of AIR. The developer must compile a .dmg for Mac, a .exe for Windows, and the choice between a few for Linux. Since I only spent this weekend on the ScreenCapture class and I’m only familiar with the Mac command line, both the class and demo app are Mac-only. Also, the demo won’t work just yet for most of you. It requires a prerelease build of AIR 2.0, but things should be okay once the Beta 2 is out.

Download ScreenCaptureDemo (Mac-only, requires AIR 2.0 prerelease)

Along with adding the ScreenCapture class to DestroyFramework, I created a repository for the ScreenCaptureDemo source and installer on GitHub as well. Check them both out and enjoy!

[note] I’m not quite sure why Vimeo decided to cut out the right audio channel in the screencast…