Adobe AIR has the ability to notify your application when the user is idle for a determine amount of time.

This idle time can be set be the developer and is similar to the idle monitors you will find in most popular chat clients

Note: This tutorial was written using Flex 3 Public Beta, but you can use Adobe Flash to create AIR content as well.

Adding this notification into a new or existing project is fairly simple. Start off by opening the main application ".mxml" file and add the following function to a new or existing script tag block.

private function init():void
{
  var nativeApp:NativeApplication = NativeApplication.nativeApplication;

  nativeApp.idleThreshold = 10;
  nativeApp.addEventListener(Event.USER_IDLE, userIdleHandler);
  nativeApp.addEventListener(Event.USER_PRESENT, userActiveHandler);			
}

The NativeApplication.nativeApplication is a static singleton (can only be one) instance of the current application. This singleton is assigned to a new variable making it easier to work with for the remainder of the code.

The idleThreshold is set to determine when a user is considered idle. The value is in seconds, which means this example is saying a user is marked idle after 10 seconds of no registered mouse or keyboard interaction

The two events that get attached to the native application assign the event handlers for the idle and active updates.

The next two functions are event handlers, called by the eventListeners assigned in the previous section of code

private function userActiveHandler(e:Event):void
{
  trace("User came back.");
}
		
private function userIdleHandler(e:Event):void
{
  trace("User is idle");
}

These two event handlers simply trace out the current status. In a more complete application you would probably change an image or update a text box depending on the application.

The last step in the code is to fire off the init() function, which is done by attaching it to the main application tag.

<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
layout="absolute" initialize="init()">

Now you can test out the application by running the debug version. Leave the mouse and keyboard idle, and you will see the trace statements appearing in the output window. From this point you can add in more real world functionality as needed, but this should get you started

This was the first of many AIR articles to be featured on Scriptplayground. If you are an AIR developer and would like to have your tutorial on this site, feel free to contact me