I'm working on a screen saver for cooporate use that I've choosen to use Adobe Air for. Once I started building and installing my first tests I ran into a few things I didn't like when clicking the preview and settings buttons in the display properties of Windows. I decided to open up a small number of choices to the users by actualy giving them a "User Options" window. Windows is kind enough to pass some arguments along, so this was actualy pretty easy.

/c = Settings Mode
/p = A preview mode
/s = Run as Screen Saver (when you click preview or computer times out)

Step one was to create a listener set. In my case I put this in my top level application instead of my EnvironmentControl.as [in my Model-Glue-Flex framework] because I wanted to keep the entire app from initializing for a settings mode.

private function onPreInitialize():void {
      NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE, onArgumentsPassed);
}

private function onArgumentsPassed(e:InvokeEvent):void {
      if (e.arguments.indexOf("/p") != -1) {
            this.exit();
      } else if (e.arguments.indexOf("/c") != -1) {
            this.settingsMode = true;
      }
}

You'll notice that I have exited the screen saver on the preview mode. I did this because I found it annoying that windows would auto-launch the screen saver both on entering the tab in display properties as well as after saving and closing the settings window; These are the only two instances that the "/p" comes up in the arguments. The preview mode is suppose to launch the screen saver into mini-mode inside the faux computer screen in the pop-up, but I'm not sure how to do this or care to at this point.