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A
Anonymous
March 16, 2012
Question

Adobe Air + New iPad (iPad 3) retina display, any idea? any one?

  • March 16, 2012
  • 11 replies
  • 29898 views

Hi, I have tried countless amount of times to turn it on, I mean, how can I run my app on the new ipad at 2048x1536, it is always scaling up the app content times 2 and if I try to scale down the whole stage >> 1 (or / 2) of course all images looks blury and horrible, any idea? any one?

something very interesting to mention is that apps made in Adobe Air looks looks slightly better on iPad2 than iPad3, because the whole content of the air app is being scaled x 2, especially on vector content like Textfields fonts, etc... this is weird, it doesn't seem to happen on native apps.

any thoughts about this?

thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

11 replies

C
Ch0usse
Participant
September 4, 2013

Maybe it's too late but whatever : in your application.xml :

  <initialWindow>

    <fullScreen>true</fullScreen>

    <width>1536</width>

    <height>2048</height>

    <renderMode>gpu</renderMode>

  </initialWindow>

K_VIKAS_CHANDRAN
K_VIKAS_CHANDRAN
Participant
July 30, 2012

Please refer : http://forums.adobe.com/message/4276097

the issue is expected to be fixed with the next release of Flash Builder

Y
yufu
Participant
August 2, 2012

Please fix this same issue in Flash Professional. Thx

J
Jamie McDaniel
Participating Frequently
March 21, 2012

Visually, my Flex app looks great on the retina screen compiled with the iOS 5.1 sdk.  Performance feels a bit slower. Unfortunately, where it was solid with the iOS sdk that comes with Flash Builder 4.6, it hard crashes (i.e. throws the user completely out of the app - no runtime error to debug) rather often under the 5.1 sdk.  Same results when using AIR 3.1 and 3.2 RC1.  So begins the testing of workarounds.    

J
Jamie McDaniel
Participating Frequently
March 22, 2012

Just a followup on my previous post, my Flex app gets 58 fps on the iPad 2 while a user rapidly scrolls a TileList.  On the new iPad with retina compiled against the ios 5.1sdk, it gets 22.  So I'm betting AIR apps that could compete with native apps with a non-retina display are going to have a new mountain to climb.  It will be interesting to watch when Adobe releases retina updates for their own AIR apps, such as Photoshop Touch.

sinious
sinious
Legend
March 22, 2012

I'm not seeing much in the way of a bump on the CPU at all from ipad2. Perhaps ~5% using CPU blitting. Pretty terrible being it's a landslides worth of difference between iPad1 and iPad2.

I haven't touched a single thing in my apps and the embedded font outlines are rendering much better. Although to tolerate iPad1 I had to set stage quality to low (using mostly bitmaps anyhow). My app looks pretty much identical in iPad2 and 3 side by side, except fonts are smoother on iPad3. Also, obviously, StageWebView content is much sharper.

M
monkey500
Known Participant
March 20, 2012

Hi guys,

My Stage is at 1024x768, set to High Res. If I import 2048px images and drop them on the timeline, and scale them down to fit,

any ideas if that will look good?

The next issue is this: Will the larger images slow down our apps? i.e will Flash be able to handle it? I'm not sure if the iPad 3 cpu is

faster, but the earlier models might take a hit.

Thanks,

Matt

A
AirDoctrine2
Inspiring
March 21, 2012

Just finished successfully building my first iPad3 supported app after migrating from FB4.5 and Air 2.7 to FB4.6 and AIR3.2 RC.

This also required me to update to Lion OSX in order to install the latest XCode which has iOS5.1. It was a very long day.

Our app looks great now on the new iPad, but initial performance appears to be terrible. Especially during screen transitions where I'm animating a large number of images.

The app still runs smoothly on my iPhone3GS and iPad2, so it seems that the iPad3 doesn't handle animating the larger images very well.

Also has anyone figured out how to support a 144x144 icon when you compile your app using the IDE? At the moment if I attempt to add a <image144x144>icon144.png</image144x144> tag to my -app.xml file this causes an error to be thrown when trying to build the app.

A
AirDoctrine2
Inspiring
March 21, 2012

Update: Setting <renderMode>gpu</renderMode> in my -app.xml file appears to have solved the performance issues I was seeing on the iPad3.

A
acrowne
Known Participant
March 19, 2012

Success!  So after including Adobe's sample vibration Native Extension (here) in the build and setting the requestedDisplayResolution to high, I am able to use Flash Builder 4.6 to build retina enabled iPad apps.  Thanks RichardLord for the help.

iBrent, I am currently just doing an Actionscript Mobile project, not a Flex Mobile project.  But it seems that as long as there is a native extension present, it will include the -platformsdk if you have specified an SDK in the Native Extensions dialog.

Colin Holgate
Colin Holgate
Inspiring
March 19, 2012

It would be interesting to test whether the vibrate ANE can actually vibrate the new iPad!

A
Applauz78
Inspiring
March 19, 2012

So can I achieve this from Flash Professional 5.5?  If so can someone tell me how ?

Cheers!

A
acrowne
Known Participant
March 19, 2012

RichardLord, I can confirm that running the identical test I posted above using AIR 3.1 but using the command line instead of Flash Builder produces a retina version of the app.  I am going to try out making a placeholder native extension and see if that will force Flash Builder to include the -platformsdk line, which I am presuming is being left out.

Thanks for the blog post.  Great info.

Adrian

iBr3nt
iBr3nt
Inspiring
March 19, 2012

Adrian,

Are you seeing this problem with Flex Mobile projects where the app

compiled using the -platformsdk shows up Retina display, but the app

itself is extremely small on the screen? Or are you just using

ActionScript mobile projects?

I'm going to post this on the Flash Builder forum and see if I can get

an answer.

iBrent

A
Anonymous
March 18, 2012

it doesn't sound complicated, it most be something really simple to do ... all we need is downloading the new Adobe Air 3.2.00000000000001 which acepts <requestedDisplayResolution>ultra-high</requestedDisplayResolution> lol!!! crossing fingers, this day is gonna be monday.

Colin Holgate
Colin Holgate
Inspiring
March 18, 2012

It seems hopeful that building the app with requestedDisplayResolution set to high, and using the iOS 5.1 SDK should make the new iPad know to work at 2048x1536. I'll probably test that tomorrow, but in the meantime the quality I'm seeing is already very high, and we won't feel bad if we ship the app as it stands.

A
alexus_one
Participating Frequently
March 18, 2012

can u post a pix of high quolity rednering? i still stuck with very visible pixilization on edges

R
RichardLord
Participating Frequently
March 16, 2012

To run at iPad retina resolution you have to set the requestedDisplayResolution to high and link to the iOS 5.1 sdk when compiling your app - use the -platformsdk compiler setting to do that. -platformsdk only works if compiling on MacOS.

J
Jamie McDaniel
Participating Frequently
March 16, 2012

Hey, thanks RichardLord.  I'm trying that now.  Do you know if linking it to the iOS 5.1 sdk results in making the app only compatible with 5.1 and higher?

R
RichardLord
Participating Frequently
March 17, 2012

Jamie, it will still be compatible with lesser versions of iOS.

sinious
sinious
Legend
March 16, 2012

Well, 3 cheers for those who are vendors and know their clients are going to open budgets to update their precious apps for the new screen. And, sorry folks, for the people who's own app is being tarnished by this. I'm sure Adobe fille fix this as we're all anticipating CS6. CS5.5 is already so antiquated it's almost going to be a complete mandatory update anyhow and Adobe (as well as us) KNEW the new ipad would have retina. No worries..

Colin Holgate
Colin Holgate
Inspiring
March 16, 2012

This is a screenshot of my name in the credits part of a Flash app. The top half of the image is the new iPad at life size, the bottom half is the iPad 2 at 200%, to make them the same size:

http://xfiles.funnygarbage.com/~colinholgate/images/ipadtext.png

This wasn't built using the 5.1 SDK trick. The text was set to _serif, in the hope that would then use the device fonts. I'll try another test with fields that have regular embedded fonts.

It could be that the 2X scaling on the new iPad is better than the 2X scaling in Preview. Or, it may be that the device font is being used. Whatever the case, the lettering looks like it has more detail.

I'm using renderMode=direct, and with that the performance is similar to the iPad 2.

A
alexus_one
Participating Frequently
March 17, 2012

i posted banch of comperecent screens in other thread.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4272566#4272566

No solutions though on fixing issues on not perefect images, even with vector

A
Anonymous
March 16, 2012

Guys! it is not too bad, but if you pay attention on it, Aobe Air apps looks slightly better on ipad1 and ipad2. the whole Flash content is being scaled x2 on the new ipad (ipad3) which is not too bad, now... all I am trying to do is running my app compatible to 5.1 retina display on this ipad, which means, I want to run my app 100% scale (not forced 200%) and place a bitmap on the stage 2048x1536 covering the whole screen, and it needs to look ultra-mega-fantastic! any ideas? any thoughts?

A
Anonymous
March 16, 2012

I think all we need for now before any new CSx version... is make the ADT look at something like this <requestedDisplayResolution>ultra-high</requestedDisplayResolution> so we can make proper apps for the new ipad

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