Menus are an integral part of your life as a software user. You find them on the Web, in desktop applications, on your own operating system, and even on mobile devices like cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) . You often don’t realize how important menus are when you use them. It’s so obvious to have them that you only realize how important they are when they aren’t available. On the Web, you normally have menus regarding the browser, which allow you to access the content of the site you are using. You rarely have menus that give you access to the specific commands and functions of the website. However, things are changing slowly with the advent of Web 2.0 applications, and menus—not only browsing menus but those specifically related to the web application—are becoming more and more frequent. As Flash web developers, you have the following options to create menus for your applications: Adding items to the context menu provided by Flash Player Creating your own menus Both options work very well, but the option of using Flash Player’s context menu doesn’t give you much flexibility. The other option requires a substantial amount of time and effort to obtain valid results if you create the menus for your web application from scratch. When you develop Adobe AIR applications with Flash CS4, you don’t need to worry about how to offer advanced functions with a menu. The framework itself provides various solutions to choose from according to your needs. AIR implements two new classes that aren’t available for Flash Player in a web environment in the flash.display package : NativeMenu NativeMenuItem These classes allow you to create native system menus to use as application menus (on Mac OS X systems), window menus (on Windows systems), pop- up menus, and context menus.

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