A day ago I published a youtube video about remote Windows control from an Android device. I will try to clarify the process about how it is done. What you need to make this work for you is (1.) an Android device with Remotair application v 0.1.9 (or higher) installed, (2.) Windows with Remotair desktop .exe air application v 0.1.3 (or higher) and (3.) some capture-desktop softwer, VH Screen Capture works good.
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While working on one of my projects where I needed compression for transfered data, I hit some very interesting compression libraries. Also the ByteArray class contains compress method, using zlib algorithm in flash player or multiple algorithms in AIR. At the end I decided to use ByteArray.compress() method for encoding vs. PHP gzuncompress for decoding, what works correctly, fast and smooth.
Here is a list of 3rd party compression libraries and other good stuff:
- AS3 Zip: ActionScript 3 based library for reading and writing zip files
- FZip: FZip is an Actionscript 3 class library to load, modify and create standard ZIP archives.
- ASZip: ActionScript 3 library to generate ZIP files
- LZMA Encoder: AS3 class to compress data using LZMA algorithm.
- LZMA Decoder: A part of the apparat framework.
- GZIP: ActionScript GZIP compression library
- Gzip for HTTPService/URLLoader: Adding Gzip support for Flex/AIR HTTPService/URLLoader
- airxzip: Zip library for ActionScript3 on AIR
If you know some more, please let me know.
Few days ago I red an interesting article about Auto update for Adobe Air executable. This article is pretty self-explanatory, it is important to notice, you have to use ApplicationUpdater instead of ApplicationUpdaterUI that was designed for .air apps. One thing I was missing there was to make the process even more dynamic by reading the update url from an update.xml file. Long story short here is a piece of code doing exact the thing:
// var updater:ApplicationUpdater;
var xml:XML = updater.updateDescriptor;
var ns:Namespace = xml.namespace();
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(xml.ns::url);
navigateToURL(request);
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After successful installing Playbook simulator and BlackBerry Air SDK, you may wonder how to deploy your app on simulator. Now you have 2 choices. You can use command line and run something like this:
blackberry-airpackager -package -installApp -launchApp -device 192.168.44.129 MyApp.bar src/MyApp-app.xml -C bin-debug MyApp.swf icons/90x90.png blackberry-tablet.xml
… this command compiles .swf file into .bar file and installs on simulator. If you prefer click-and-deploy solution, just go into folder with your blackberry sdk:
.../sdks/blackberry-tablet-sdk-0.9.1/eclipse_for_FB401
and copy all content into your flash builder / eclipse directory.
.../Adobe/Adobe Flash Builder 4
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SystemMouse is a class I managed to create for Remotair demo receiver, in order to show how can remote MouseEvent-s be projected into system. Long story short, you can use moveBy() function to move the system cursor and event() function to make clicks. The class is based on NativeProcess. The NativeProcess class and its capabilities are only available to AIR applications installed with a native installer (extended desktop profile applications) means .exe/.dmg file.
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Remotair is a concept of transmitting device input events (gestures, accelerometer, camera etc.) into receiving flash or AIR application. Remotair consists of one transmitting application installed on a mobile device or a tablet and one receiving application running on a PC. In order to pair transmitting and receiving application, RTMFP protocol is used. The receiver API is public and released under MIT license.
You can download Remotair application from Android market (link only works on android devices) or see the Android application details on AppBrain. For a receiving application you may use the demo application located on remotair.yoz.sk or you can build your own one using Remotair Receiver API.
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After switching my AIR application into new AIR 2.5 SDK, boom! Every single URLRequest threw an IOErrorEvent. No other exception thrown. So I started digging in in order to find the cause and it appeared to be Security.loadPolicyFile() execution (I am reusing some libs containing these lines) that blocked it all quietly. First I tried to do try-catch block over it, but with no success. Than I just removed the lines for AIR project and voilà, everything back to normal again. URLRequests works again. It seems like AIR does not need loadPolicyFile() for URLRequests at all. Interesting that these loadPolicyFile() were targeting total different domain and were able to break any other requests.
It is now a few weeks after I started experimenting with AIR for Android. While watching all the great tutorials about how to make things work (AIR for Android – Part 1, Part 2) and how to debug application running on device (Debug AIR apps on Android with Flash Builder 4, another in french and Flash), I have decided to attach some of my own findings and practices to build, deploy and debug apps.
To start, it is a good practice to setup your environment variable path to Android sdk and AIR sdk:
PATH: ...;C:/Users/Yoz/Work/Android/SDK/2.2;C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\sdks\4.1.0.16076-AIR2.5\bin
Next, the whole certificate thing does not make sense to me because you can/have to create one by yourself. The cert need to be valid for 25 years else Android Market will not accept your application (bye bye real signed certificate from PGP TrustCenter 
)
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