Swift resources for Flash and ActionScript developers

Hello, fellow Flash developer! Did you find this page while looking for “the #Swift equivalent of this #ActionScript piece of code”? Or are you looking to transfer your #Flash skills into native #iOS development? In either case, you are in the right place. If you have spent some time making Flash apps and coding in ActionScript, you are well on your way to knowing your way around Swift and won’t need to start from scratch. We have collected some resources that can help on your learning journey: they have been created with your experience in mind and by developers who speak your language – after Read More

Categories: AIR Native Extensions.

Gameplay Recorder Performance

Today’s article is a response to a question we found ourselves answering quite a lot on the e-mail since the release of our Gameplay Recorder Native Extension for iOS. The question was: How does Gameplay Recorder affect performance? The performance of an app that uses it, that is. In other words: does the ANE affect your app’s frame rate and how much; does it matter what resolution you choose for recording your gameplay. Intro Let us first have a look at the phases of the gameplay screen recording that have the potential to affect an app’s performance: Rendering a frame Read More

Categories: AIR Native Extensions.

Record Starling gameplay video

In today’s game experience players are much more socially involved than ever before. Even when playing alone you want to record that epic battle with the big bad Boss and later to show it off in the social media. Starling is a great game development framework that can run on desktop and mobile devices, but recording the gameplay on mobile platforms can be a real pain to implement. In this tutorial you will learn how to use Gameplay Recorder native extension for iOS to capture awesome videos directly from your game’s screen. Any previous knowledge about Starling framework counts as Read More

Categories: AIR Native Extensions and Tutorials.

Keeping your C native code reusable and independent of AIR

When you make a native extension using the AIR C API, your native code tends to have two parts:

  • one that's concerned with exposing functionality in a way that AIR can call, in other words, dependent on the AIR C API;
  • functional part, which deals with the platform-specific stuff. This part of your code doesn't (and shouldn't) care about whether it's used in an AIR native extension, a purely native app or something else.

Ideally you want to keep the dependency between these two parts one-directional: the AIR-concerned part should depend on the functional part, but the functional part should not know about and depend on AIR. If you decide to reuse your, say camera or speech recognition functionality, in another project that's not AIR-related , you don't want to force that to include the AIR C API.

So, what happens if you need to dispatch an event from the functional part of your code? Say, the camera refused to start or the speech processor is ready with results and you want you alert AIR to this... Read More

Categories: AIR Native Extensions.

Extension Initializer and Finalizer in C

The Extension Initializer and Finalizer are the entry and exit points to your native extension. They are also two of the ingredients that make your extension known to the world and make it distinguishable from other extensions in an app. This is why they need to have unique names. Their signatures however need to be exactly as prescribed by AIR. Today we look at what these are in the AIR C API.

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Categories: AIR Native Extensions.