AIR 2.7
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- Boz0
registe.. of course I'm using it.. my million dollar project is using all of this stuff and I"m excited about AIR 2.7 because it is now solved some performance issues on iOS I had.
I am also an Adobe partner and I've been working with iOS packager before Flash CS5 was released and AIR 2.x was even available for mobile devices.
With the tools you have now.. you can do about 70% of the things you might need in an app..
There are a few things missing (a proper notifications API access, no intents on Android (that's like a hook to allow other applications to communicate with yours and return something to that requesting app).
What you do have is the following:
1. Video camera access
2. Microphone access
3. File System access (Photos)
4. GeoLocation (GPS)
5. Accelerometer
6. Web view access in the app (for oAuth and HTML5 content)I think we can expect in the next build for in-app purchasing to be addressed and notifications. If your app is relying on notifications and intents for Android you will be better off building natively but if your feature set in the app requires what you have available you can do whatever you want really.
There are some caution you need to take because it's not just as simple as making animations in movieclips and expecting it will work fast.. The reason is because the objects that are not drawn/pre-cached on screen cannot be accelerated through OpenGL ES until you wrote them to the GPU. Only after you instantiated them like that and they are cached moving, rotating and similar will be super fast because it is GPU accelerated.
CPU does work ok now but you can't get 60 fps so you have to be wise and read a little bit about optimizing before you dive in.
For simplest things you should be fine. It's easy as pie.. you draw shit in, you make buttons or whatever, you publish as .IPA or .APK file and you are done.
For iOS you need to get your developer certificate to use with Flash CS5.5 while for Android Adobe has simple certificate generator and it's automatic directly from the app.
Flash doesn't have UI elements so you will have to make your own. Flex is more tailored to devs really and has a lof of the UI elements like lists, swipe to new screen controls that adjust to iOS or Android styles of buttons.
Overall it's very easy and to get the maximum performance it's recommend you use pure AS3. Flex is getting there but doing your own things and doing pure AS3 is the fastest.