Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR [4]
The ADT tool is called adt or adt.bat and is located in the bin folder. adt.jar is the executable file called by adt or adt.bat and is located in the lib folder.
AIR Debug Launcher (ADL)
ADL is used to test your AIR application during development without packaging it. It uses the runtime included in the SDK, and prints trace statements and runtime errors. It is also used to start a Flash Debugger (FDB) session.
The ADL tool is called adl or adl.exe and is located in the bin folder.
AIR runtime
The AIR runtime is used to launch and test your application during the development and debugging process, before you install the application on the device. It contains the emulator and device versions for both desktop and Android devices.
The AIR runtime is called Runtime.apk and is located in the runtimes folder.
Frameworks
The Frameworks directory includes all the AIR core libraries.
Adobe recently made available some documentation on using the command-line tool for ADT. We will cover these commands in Chapter 3. If you need an explanation or a refresher on using the command-line tool, please refer to Using the Command-Line Tool in Chapter 3.
New ActionScript Libraries
Many libraries were added to AIR 2.5 with a specific focus on mobile development. We will cover all of them in detail in the chapters to come. Here is a list of the new functionality and APIs, and the chapters in which they are discussed:
Chapter 2, Call Me, Text Me
AIR application debugging on Android
Simulation on the desktop
URI schemes to invoke native Android applications
Chapter 4, Permissions, Certificates, and Installation
Application icons
Certificate validity
Application permissions
Application versioning
Chapter 5, Evaluating Device Capabilities and Handling Multiple Devices
Screen orientation API
System idle detection and overwrite
New soft keys to register for keyboard events on the Android device
Virtual keyboard
Chapter 7, Multitouch Technology
Gestures
Multitouch capability
Chapter 8, Accelerometer
Accelerometer
Chapter 9, Camera
Access to the device’s camera application
Access to the device’s media library
Chapter 10, Geolocation
Geolocation
Chapter 11, Microphone and Audio
Access to the device’s microphone
Chapter 12, Video
Camera video capture
Chapter 13, StageWebView
StageWebView, used to render HTML content inside mobile AIR applications
NetworkInfo
Chapter 14, Hardware Acceleration
OpenGL ES 2 and hardware acceleration
Functionalities Not Yet Supported
Some features are not yet supported in AIR at the time of this writing, while others may not be planned as part of future releases. For instance, some APIs and features that are missing from AIR include those for activating the phone’s vibrate function via AIR, accessing the native Android contact list, creating Android intents, messaging to the status/notification bar, enabling one AIR application to open another, and creating widgets.
If you would like a specific feature added to AIR, send a request to Adobe at https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform.
AIR on the Desktop Versus AIR on Android
If you want to convert an existing AIR desktop application to Android, you must make a few changes:
If you are using Flash Builder, the WindowedApplication application MXML tag needs to be changed to ViewNavigatorApplication. WindowedApplication assumes there is a NativeWindow, which is not the case on Android.
In the Application descriptor, the namespace must be 2.6 or later and the visible tag must be set to true.
The AIR SDK packaging command must use apk as the target.
The following desktop functionalities are not supported on Android:
ActionScript 2, ContextMenu, DatagramSocket, Dockicon, EncryptedLocalStore, HTMLoader, LocalConnection, NativeMenu, NativeWindow, PrintJob, SecureSocket, ServerSocket, StorageVolumeInfo, SystemTrayIcon , Updater, XMLSignatureValidator
Mobile Flash Player 10.1 Versus AIR 2.6 on Android
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