Camera Tutorial: Introduction

April 15, 2014 |

At the end of this tutorial you will have

  • A native extension for AIR that connects with the native camera and captures frames from it.
  • A test app that uses the native extension and can help you test and debug its code.

Camera Test App GUI

Total time

I've broken down the tutorial into parts, each of which should take between 5 and 20 minutes to implement. I expect the full tutorial to take you between an hour and a half and two hours in total. You've got to love software project estimates. :) If you've completed the whole tutorial, leave a comment and let me know whether my estimate was way off base. Continue Reading

Recipe for packaging an ANE

March 19, 2014 |

This post will show you how to package an ANE - AIR Native Extension - on the command line. 

The bad news first: it's a nuisance - a lot of file copying, renaming and deleting before you even get to run any command-line tools. Now the good news: all of this can be automated with a script - see the note at the end of this article. Continue Reading

Loading your ANE – order of operations

March 13, 2014 |

A native extension that you app uses only gets loaded in memory if the app makes a call into it. We have so far covered a couple of steps that happen at that point: extension initialization and extension context initialization. Let us now look at the process of loading the ANE in terms of what order these calls are made in and which parts of the system make them. Below is a diagram that illustrates what happens when an iOS ANE is loaded in memory: Continue Reading