Anti Aliasing and Cache As Bitmap on iOS

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Kshitiz Gupta | Comments (3)

In this post, I will explain a little about how Cache As Bitmap can impact Anti Aliasing of your content.

Let’s start with a definition. To put it very simply, I will say that anti aliasing is what gives smooth look to your content. Anti Aliasing is a way to make content look smoother by drawing certain pixels to avoid jaggedness.

For iOS applications, there are two render modes – cpu and gpu. Let us look at what all can happen with this seemingly harmless change. For all further purpose please assume that we have set the render mode as gpu within application descriptor.

Before I start, look at the two ellipses in the diagram. If you stare hard enough you will agree with me that the left image loses out when compared to the one on right in terms of quality. The right one looks like a smoother version of the left one. If you had difficulty defining anti aliasing then this image should help clear the definition. The right one is anti aliased better or is smoother.

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AIR 3.3 now supports iOS SDK 5.1

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Varun Bhatia | Comments (2)

iOS 5The latest release of AIR SDK (version 3.3) now supports iOS 5.1 SDK. AIR 3.3 SDK includes stubs of all the frameworks and the public libraries available in iOS 5.1 SDK. Frameworks that have been added as stubs in the AIR 3.3 SDK are Accounts, Twitter, NewsstandKit, CoreBluetooth, CoreImage, GSKit and GLKit. Some of the public libraries whose stubs have been added into the AIR SDK are libxml2.dylib, libsqlite3.dylib, libAWDProtocolbuf.dylib and many more. This change relieves the AIR developer of the following requirements:-

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Push Notifications Support in iOS

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Varun Bhatia | Comments (52)

[UPDATE: InvokeEventReason.NOTIFICATION added for accessing the notification payload when application was not running in the background. Latest AIR build containing these changes available here]

Push/Remote Notifications support for iOS platform has been made available in latest release of AIR 3.4. This blogpost will cover everything you need to do to get remote/push notifications working in your AIR application: subscribing for remote notifications, configuring your application in the iOS Provisioning Portal, sending notifications to Apple’s Push Notification Service (APNS), and handling them in your application. Another detailed article discussing Push Notifications Support in AIR can be found at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/ios-push-notifications.html

Overview

Remote notifications, or server push or push notifications, describe a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given notification is initiated by the publisher or central server. It contrasts with pull technology, where the request for the transmission of information is initiated by the receiver or client (device in our case). Push technology has the advantage over pull notifications that device battery and network bandwidth are saved when no new data is available. Continue reading…

StageAspectRatio Enhancements in AIR 3.3

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Varun Bhatia | Comments (11)

One must have come across many mobile applications(mostly games) that remain in landscape orientation across their lifetime. They start in landscape orientations and remain in landscape orientations irrespective of the orientation in which the device is held or moved. A landscape only application should ideally support both landscape orientations namely Landscape_Left and Landscape_Right and should not auto rotate to any portrait orientation if the device is held in one of the portrait orientations.

Prior to AIR 3.3, StageAspectRatio supported two public constants PORTRAIT and LANDSCAPE. Using one of these values in the aspectRatio tag in the application descriptor would only lead to the application opening up in PORTRAIT or LANDSCAPE orientation respectively. However, the Stage would re-orient in all orientations as per the new device orientation. For example:- with StageAspectRatio set to PORTRAIT, an app would open in PORTRAIT orientation but would reorient to LANDSCAPE_LEFT orientation when device orientation was changed to LANDSCAPE_LEFT.

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Using platformsdk for iOS on Windows

Posted on May 18, 2012 by neha | Comments (12)

With AIR 3.3, it is possible to use platformsdk switch for iOS on a Windows machine too. For using this feature, one needs to copy the desired iOS SDK (iPhoneOS.x.y.sdk) on their Windows machine and use the platformsdk switch of the ADT:

adt -package 
   -target (ipa-test|ipa-test-interpreter|ipa-debug|
                ipa-debug-interpreter|ipa-ad-hoc|ipa-app-store) 
   SIGNING_OPTIONS 
   -provisioning-profile <path to .mobileprovision>
   <output IPA file> 
   <application.xml> <SWF> <assets> -extdir <path to extensions folder>
   -platformsdk <path to the iOS SDK folder>

Now, this seems fairly simple, the only difficulty which may arise is while copying the SDK from Mac to Windows machine(as symbolic links are present on Mac, which need to be copied as actual files on Windows, else packaging would fail).

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