Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Experiment: Fake Transparency

Recently, I have tried to make window for AIR application in vista-style . I mean, transparent window and blur effect applied on it.


I realized that I can make transparent AIR window and apply blur effect on it, but all objects on this window will be blurred as well. After some research, I understood that it is impossible to implement such feature like window in vista-style with AIR 1.5. Then I decided to try to make a desktop screenshot, copy area under the window and apply it to the backgroundImage property. But there was another problem, AIR 1.5 could not do a screenshot. So I decided to postpone this experiment to next version of AIR.

But some days ago, on the everythingflex blog I found post about Java bridge to AIR application called Merapi. Using this bridge, AIR application could do a screen shot. I decided to a bit amend sample in that post. The result of my experiment is below:



Original size.

Update: Source code for AIR application is available here.

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