Developing Android Extensions for AIR 3: A Beginner’s Guide
Adobe AIR is a powerful platform, and its use on the BlackBerry PlayBook made deploying Aqualux there a painless and productive effort. For me, the choice to use AIR to translate my game on to mobile was informed by two major advantages; first, the relative ease of taking a fairly complex codebase already written in Actionscript 3, and quickly moving it on to other devices; and second, the advantages of working in an environment where 90% of implementation details of cross-platform development- rendering, I/O, networking, and sound- have already been handled. For that other 10%- platform specific features, like in-app purchases, DRM, and other OS-level specifics- you can now write and deploy native code inside your application with the Native Extensions features in AIR 3.
In this article, I'll be covering the process of building an AIR Native Extension for Android, step by step. If you're familiar with Java and/or Android, this is surprisingly simple. If you're not, don't worry- Actionscript 3 borrows a lot of syntax and features from Java, and if you know the former you'll have no problem reading and understanding the latter.
Announcing Nook Color Native Extension for AIR 3
This thing's pretty sweet.
Adobe has officially announced AIR 3, and Flash Player 11. Flash 11 has some very slick 3D stuff to offer (I suspect we're going to see some very high profile games start to show up in the browser later this year), but it's AIR 3 that's really exciting for Flash mobile developers. Adobe's done on a great job of picking up the performance across devices, as well as adding some key features that are closing the gap between platform-specific/native mobile development and AIR, specifically, captive runtime for mobile, and native extensions.
Currently, we're working with a partner on bringing some Actionscript 3 content on the Nook Color. The Nook is a great Android-based tablet, and it has a built-in AIR 2.6 runtime. With the release of AIR 3, the power of Captive Runtime and Native Extensions enable access to platform-specific features of the Nook via AIR apps.
Today, we're releasing an extension called NookColorTools. It's free, and it gives you a very simple AS3 API to the Nook SDK. AIR 3 isn't in its final release yet, but you can download the release candidate here right now and start experimenting. Grab NookColorTools v1 here, and checkout the readme file for instructions; there's also an example project to get you started. One feature for now- launching a product page on the Nook Color shop. This is a powerful feature to have for cross promoting your apps with a 'more games' button in the like. We'll be adding more features shortly.
Milkman Games will also be producing a selection of high quality AIR extensions for iOS and Android in the next few weeks- Game Center, in App Purchase, Android Intents, and all sorts of other goodies. To stay up to date, follow @milkmangames on Twitter!