I’ve been working on more mobile projects lately both at work and in my spare time. I’ve been mainly using the Starling framework and really like it so far. The other day I heard about a new technology being developed by Autodesk that takes flash games written in ActionScript and ports them to Android and iOS. It’s in the early stages, but it looks really promising. To learn more about it go here: http://gameware.autodesk.com/scaleform/advantage
Category: Mobile Apps
Starling iOS app rotates after splash screen
So I’ve been using Flash Builder and the Starling framework to create an iOS app of the Card Match game that I made a while back. I must say I’m pretty happy with the results, but there have been a few quirks. One of them was driving me nuts. I’m not sure how many of you will run into this but if you do hopefully this post will help. Here’s what it was doing: When the app would launch it would show the splash screen like it should and right after the splash screen was finished my whole app would rotate so that it was now upside down. I tried changing and then changing again the full screen and auto rotate properties in the app xml and nothing happened. So then I decided that I would just recreate the project in Flash Builder, so I made a new project and imported my classes, built it, and everything worked fine. Again I’m not sure why or if it was just a fluke, but if this happens to you, try making a new project.
I was recently working on a Flex Mobile Project and kept having this happen. After a lot of time and frustration I finally figured it out. By just adding -swf-version=29 to the compiler options that solved the problem. I think that it somehow wasn’t using the last AIR SDK somehow. I used the latest Apache SDK and it worked so I knew that it had to have something with the version. My guess is that without having that in there to force it to use the latest one it’s just missing something.
Mp3 works on pc but not on my iPad Starling
I have been using Flash Builder and Starling 1.3 to create some iPad apps and recently ran into an issue that was making me want to pull out my hair. Luckily for me I don’t have any hair. The latest version of Starling (1.3) has a new AssetManager class in the starling.utils package. It’s pretty cool, it handles the loading and accessing of all of the assets for your apps. In the app that I’m working on I’m using it to load the graphic assets and the audio assets. Sounds simple enough right? That’s what I thought too, but then I ran into a little problem. When I ran the app on my PC using the AIR simulator the audio played fine, but when I ran it on my iPad I couldn’t hear any audio. It wasn’t throwing any errors, I just couldn’t hear anything. After trying everything I could think of, one of the guys that I work with told me to send him the audio files I was using and he would try them in his app. That got me thinking and so asked him to send me some of his audio files as well because they were working. So he did and they worked in my app. To make this long story short, the problem was with the particular MP3 files. I opened them up in Audition and saved them at a different bitrate and that did it. Not sure how many people will run into this, but if you do, try saving the mp3 file differently and see if that fixes it.