Creating Windows Shortcuts in Adobe AIR

I was just starting to dig into experimenting shortcuts in AIR. Particularly, I want to create custom hotkey with my shortcut. There is a terrific article on Windows Shortcuts in AIR at Awen Code:

“This should have been easy, but thanks to Microsoft's proprietary binary file format, it really wasn't…the standard Windows shortcut file is a .lnk file.

“As you'd expect, it being a Microsoft format, there's no official documentation on the file format itself. Microsoft expects you to use their COM objects and APIs to both read and write these files. Unfortunately we've got no way to get at these APIs from AIR.”

“However, there is an alternative.

“Windows also supports .url files; these are intended to be Internet Explorer links, but it turns out that you can use them in an identical way to normal Windows shortcuts. Happily, they are simple text files and format is really easy.”