March 22, 2011 - 4 comments

Air 2.6 for iPhone Demo inc Video and Git Source

With the release of the new Air 2.6 SDK yesterday I wanted to see what performance improvements had been made. After a couple of hours playing with Ant scripts I managed to get this example up and running on my iPhone4.


This small demo is now up on my github account so feel free to take a look. I won't go into too much detail but the general process to get it up and running includes...

  1. Down the 2.6 SDK from here
  2. Download the demo project here
  3. Obtain the necessary mobile provision and certificate files from your Apple Developer account
  4. Setup the project in your editor of choice
  5. Amend the project, asset and SDK locations in the Ant build script
  6. Package the iPhone app
  7. Install the app and mobile provision file to your phone via iTunes

This demo just to show how good the new performance is and doesn't deal with the new features of the SDK update. It is worth playing around with the render modes set in the descriptor file and different caching types effect the performance of the app.

Published by: nick in Flash, Flex, Mobile

Comments

stan
April 3, 2011 at 8:19 am

Hi,

Could you share the steps you took to create it?

1. How did you compile the swf? Flash cs5 or flex? Would compiling from Flash CS5 require specifying the flash player version? or would it be better to compile it to an intermediate air file and then package it using adt?

2. What optimisation did you do? is it in GPU or CPU render mode? was cache as bitmap or matrix used?

Would love to hear from you.

stan
April 3, 2011 at 8:22 am

Sorry I posted in the wrong place.

I wanted to post it where you showed your WCK/Air 2.6 demo. I cant find that post now.

The above comments are for the WCK demo only.

Thanks

    admin
    April 3, 2011 at 3:04 pm

    No worries, unfortunately I haven’t released the source for the WCK demo as I’m currently working on a Box2dAS(Alchemy) script only version just so I can monitor the clean up process a little better and manage the builds dynamically. At the moment it isn’t possible to use Flash CS5 to create the required IOS Air files, this is something a lot of the community is asking Adobe to do asap and why this wasn’t done for the release of the new SDK. To quote Adobe “Because AIR 2.6 does not support iOS 3 and armv6 devices, existing AIR for iOS applications cannot be updated to AIR 2.6. ”

    My work flow for the WCK demo I posted was a simple case of creating the scene in Flash and exporting a swc with my assets in, including the world all the assets were laid out in. I then imported this swc to my Flash Builder project and created an instance of the world that was added to stage. This project was then compiled against an Ant script but the same can be done via the command line. Yet again, why Adobe didn’t release an update to Burrito at least to improve work flow is something people are asking.

    My best advice for optimization is to play around with it, you’ll soon appreciate why everything is talking about it. The demo project I have set up on GitHub is using “gpu” but if you change this you’ll notice the difference in performance.

    This is still the early phase of the new SDK, once you get your first demo up and running I’m sure you’ll continue to play, luckily I had a day or two to get some demos up running and move on with. Also as you can image the Flash community is going crazy over this kind of stuff at the moment so keep up to date on relevant RSS and twitter feeds and I’m sure you’ll pick up some more helpful tips. I can’t imagine it will be too long before Adobe release an update to Flash CS5 and Flash Builder to improve the work flow for IOS projects…. good luck!

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