At the same time I released YCanvas, I have spotted an interesting starling experiment. I realized I can do this for YCanvas easily with Remotair. Remotair is a concept of transmitting device inputs (gestures, accelerometer, camera etc.) into receiving flash or AIR application. Consists of one transmitting app installed on a mobile device or a tablet and one receiving app running on a PC. In order to pair transmitting and receiving application, RTMFP protocol is used. Implementing remotair reciever into any flash application takes only a few minutes, I spent much more time on touch + multitouch implementation with transitions. At the end of the day, I was able to remote controll YCanvas application with BlackBerry Playbook.
Read the rest of this entry »
After a few months off from mobile development, I realized I have forgotten all the necessary developer, application and market links for my Android, iOS, BlackBerry applications. Furthermore, it took me some time to gather them all back together as well as market deeplinks for all environments. So, I have decided to put the list together that will help me catch much faster next time.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
In order to get orientation of your android device you need to do “some” math, based on geolocation and accelerometer values. Working with Android native SDK, you are able to get orientation as easy as calling SensorManager.getOrientation(), but when it comes to AIR SDK, you have no access to the native SDK methods. However, thanks to open sources you are able to grab the original source and rewrite the thing into ActionScript. That is exatcly what I have done. The results are GeomagneticField and SensorManager classes. To make this happen you need both AccelerometerEvent and GeolocationEvent values as intput:
Read the rest of this entry »
For now I succeeded with general approach – Android market application. If you go through Publishing Your Applications you will notice there is a url (with market:// scheme) that can be used to navigate user to your application in Android market. Sadly this url works only from Android device not from desktop (404 not found)! So I came up with this code:
var isAndroid = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().search("android") > -1;
if(isAndroid && confirm("Do you want to run onBoard Android application?"))
window.location = "market://details?id=air.onBoard2Android";
What it does is:
- it first test user agent if it is an Android device, if so
- it asks user to decide wheter to use Android and than
- it redirects user into Android market application showing details of your application
From here user can install or open the application. You may try it on http://onboard.yoz.sk (run from Android device).
I was also playing with the idea about how to run my Android AIR application from browser, well normaly for AIR apps you would use install badge or its customized version in order to check if the application is installed already and then run or install it. But I hit a major problem with air.swf not dispatching Event.INIT on Android flash player 
… I will surely get back into this to discover more.
When working with AIR on Android, I felt into an issue with stage.mouseX (stage.mouseY) returning value 107374182. It seems I am not the only one who experience that, but also Michael Ritchie and Lex Talkington did. This happens after you release touch screen. You may expect that Event.MOUSE_LEAVE would be fired in the right moment, but that sometimes just does not (sometime it does). I did not found any better solution than testing returned values against the static number, so I came up with this piece of code:
if(stage && (int(Math.abs(stage.mouseX)) == 107374182
|| int(Math.abs(stage.mouseY)) == 107374182))
return;
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 )
Read the rest of this entry »
