Christian Cantrell

I don’t have a multi-touch computer (yet), but I do have a MacBook with a multi-touch trackpad which means I can write AIR 2 applications that incorporate gestures. The video below demonstrates a few of the new gesture APIs in AIR 2:

The code below shows how to indicate that you want to receive gesture events (as opposed to multi-touch, or no touch events at all), and registers for zoom, rotate, and pan gesture events (the watch variable refers to a Sprite which contains the bitmap image of the watch):

Multitouch.inputMode = MultitouchInputMode.GESTURE;
watch.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_ZOOM, onZoom);
watch.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_ROTATE, onRotate);
watch.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_PAN, onPan);

The three functions below show responding to each of the gesture events:

private function onZoom(e:TransformGestureEvent):void
{
var watch:Sprite = e.target as Sprite;
watch.scaleX *= e.scaleX;
watch.scaleY *= e.scaleY;
}

private function onRotate(e:TransformGestureEvent):void
{
var watch:Sprite = e.target as Sprite;
watch.rotation += e.rotation;
}

private function onPan(e:TransformGestureEvent):void
{
var watch:Sprite = e.target as Sprite;
var watchBitmap:Bitmap = watch.getChildAt(0) as Bitmap;
watchBitmap.x += e.offsetX;
watchBitmap.y += e.offsetY;
}

For much more information on how multi-touch and gestures work in both AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 (including OS and hardware support, which gestures are supported where, and a thorough review of the APIs), and to download sample code, see Multi-touch and Gesture Support on the Flash Platform. Or, if you just want to see the code for this sample, you can download it here.

I’ve been wanting to write my own email notifier in AIR for a long time, but without support for encrypted sockets, it wasn’t easy to do. But now that AIR 2 added the new SecureSocket class, I was able to write a pretty functional email notifier in just a couple of days:

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SearchCentral uses the new NativeProcess APIs in AIR 2 in order to integrate with Spotlight and provide very fast local file system search. Here’s a demo:

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Below is a screencast of an application I wrote called FileTile in order to validate the new storage volume APIs in AIR 2:

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In order to validate the new ServerSocket APIs in AIR 2, I wrote an application called HTTPeek. HTTPeek is a proxy server that sits between your browser and the network, and can show you HTTP request and response headers. It can handle compressed content, chunked content, binary content, etc. Check out the video below to see it in action:

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