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VooDoo Chicken
Known Participant
December 2, 2013
Question

tutorials about mobile apps

  • December 2, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 2105 views

yes, I am aware that there are some tutorials about making mobile apps in adobe site, plus there are also complete sections of the site dedicated to that and even they provide sdks and other stuff.

the thing is, I look for tutorials either from adobe or from google, and it will send me to flash builder tutorials, and how to use flex to make mobile apps. are there any FLAH tutorials for mobile app development? I mean, using ACTIONSCRIPT and no flex, since if I wanted flex I would have searched for flex and not search like 'FLASH mobile apps tutorial' (or something like that)

In particular, I would like to know which events to expect (for example, how to handle an incomming call -which may be equivalent to a 'lost focus' event-, how to handle memory heap or to find quantity of memory available, find if gpu is available etc); that, from ACTIONSCRIPT

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1 reply

sinious
sinious
Legend
December 2, 2013

Are you using Flash Builder or Flash Pro? I'm assuming Flash Pro if you're in this forum. You simply start a project, target AIR for [target OS] and start coding. The idea behind all of this is to bring what you already know about Flash and web design over to making an application.

I stay away from Flex largely myself. I have too many hand written libraries and utilize many other frameworks and projects (Starling, FeathersUI, Away3D, etc) so I also stick strictly to AS3 mobile projects.

The answers to your existing questions and others will come down to investigating the AIR SDKs abilities which are integrated into the same AS3 livedocs. You'll simply see the AIR triangle icon next to features only available in AIR and then you'll want to read the notes on that class to be sure it supports mobile before using it. Often the AIR classes support a common "isSupported" property which is a boolean for any specific technology, such as "StageVideo", "CameraUI", etc.

You'll then want to learn about Adobe Native Extensions (ANEs). When you lack the ability to do something from AIR SDK itself you can create native libraries (obj-c on iOS, Java on Android, etc) that perform your tasks and integrate it with AIR to enable your application to do a variety of extra things the AIR SDK cannot currently do.

Question by question..

- Incoming call: Try not to think so directly about what's happening, that a phone call occured. What really happened is the user changed to a different app, your app lost focus and will throw a deactivate event. When the user returns an activate event will fire off. You could use this to detect it:

NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(flash.events.Event.DEACTIVATE, doThisFunctionOnDeactivate);

NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(flash.events.Event.ACTIVATE, doThisFunctionOnActivate);

- Device statistics like total memory, again, stick to the Flash basics. The System class has a totalMemory property. Try what you already know exists and work backwards from that. Memory is a fuzzy subject anyhow because you're going to want to use GPU memory as well and that information can be more difficult to obtain without ANEs, or not possible at all.

- I don't know of any smartphone without a GPU so I'd say it's a safe bet that whatever you run this on has a GPU of some type. How AIR will render itself is a different story. This depends device to device, OS to OS. The very safe answer is, yes, the device has a GPU.

Everything else will come to you just looking through livedocs, using google if you please, just searching for the property or function for mobile you want. Either a livedoc class will show up or some other resource pointing towards it.

V
VooDoo ChickenAuthor
Known Participant
December 2, 2013

Hi. I am using Flash Pro and I am aware I can use Flash pro to make mobile apps, now I want to know the particularities of making mobile apps using Flash pro; all those aspects that should been taken care off when developing specifically for mobile platforms that are not present while making Flash presentations for the web (like events in mobile devices)

sinious
sinious
Legend
December 2, 2013

The basics depend on your target. iOS devices have significantly less possible resolutions and hardware and are generally easier in all ways to develop for. If it runs great on your iPad AIR then it will run great on mine too. You will need to handle devices of varying resolutions but the hardware is much easier on this.

Android and desktop are different beasts. Now you're getting into sporadic resolutions and hardware. Your app will need to deal with a large amount of potential resolutions. You can specify which device types your app is capable of handling (tablet-only 7" and up, XHDPI only, etc etc). You'll need to write code to either scale your app up to meet the screen size or hand code it to align to any specific resolution yourself. I do the latter typically. I get the resolution of the device and lay out my apps based on what is available.

There's a ton of events of all kinds. You'll really need to be more specific on what exactly you're interested in. Also, what OS are you targeting?

There's no shortage of full (older) tutorials that'll put you on the path and even develop something so you can actually see it run on your device and feel a bit more in control. There's nothing all that magical about mobile development (thanks to Adobe making it easier).

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