Mobile development can be easy and should be easy. In this course we learn how to develop in Adobe Air and discover how the Orientation commands work with the IOS/Android devices. This is part two of our cluster of courses on Adobe AIR to find out more Adobe AIR courses click here.

Welcome to the second installment of Learning how to develop mobile applications. When I say mobile applications I mean iPhone,iPad, Android Blackberry and many other devices(over 6000 devices supported). As this is our second title you are probably familiar with Adobe AIR if not please first go to our first title before continuing any further.

So what are we going to learn today?

we will talk briefly again about why we should use Adobe AIR over other options out there. We will revisit and overview the steps involved with publishing applications From Flash to Adobe AIR. Our main topic will be all about orientation of devices. By the end of this course you will know everything you need to know about orientation and how to get your content to scale and fit any device.

Let's get back and start cracking. Again please watch our first course before moving into this one but as I know many of you rush your way through things we are doing a quick recap in hopes it will confuse you and get you into part 1 where you should have been if you haven't seen it yet!

Everything we will be working on in this title is going to work for all mobile devices there not specific per device but per capabilities. We will start by seeing again how to configure and publish your application. In part one we go in detail into the steps involved when creating your application using Adobe AIR.

Our first step before we can start coding is we need to configure our application to listen into the orientation events. By default our application when we create it will only work in one mode but wouldn't auto-orient at all! We first need to change the configurations and enable our application to auto configure. So the first step in our training will be to setup and prepare our application to be enabled to auto-rotate. Once in the debugger we are not done yet we will need to enable orientation in the debugger as well. Once we follow all these steps our application will automatically auto-orient its content every time we move our device.

Now that we got our application to rotate as we see fit we will discover our first problem. The main issues is that we just don't like what we are seeing. In the next step we will need to start configuring how we want the content to scale. So we will take deep dive into the world of scaling content. We take a look at all the possible ways we can scale content in our application.

There are some common challenges when it comes to building applications that scale, such as mobile applications. So we take a moment to talk about why we should probably avoid pixels as much as we can and stick to vector graphics for where ever it is possible.

Going through really quickly all the steps we've gone through already before continuing to the next step. We will take a peak into the XML file that is built as well before we wrap up this video up.

Now that things are orienting there doing it all on there own but wouldn't it be nice if you know when something changes so you can make tweaks to your application and enable it to look better on the screen when the user rotates there device. Well i'm glad you asked as that is what we will be talking about next. We will learn how to listen in on the events that are triggered when a user rotates there device. By the end of this video you will know everything you need to know about this event.

Fair enough Ben, you know how to listen in on the event but what if you really don't want your device to rotate at all you want it to do something else or have a custom change that you control on your own. That's our next step so hold your horses and join us as we talk about how you can prevent the default way of action so you can control it on your own.

Great thanks ben, your welcome student. You now know how to enable orientation in your device, test it out on your mobile device, listen in on changes and even stop them. You're probably thinking we are all set ? Well not yet, as you don't know yet what is the actual orientation of the users. In the next step we will learn how to know what is our current orientation of our device.

Finally we are done talking about orienting things. Congrats we are ready to move on to the next topic %u2013 not that far away and yet connected to what we where talking about before. Ratios and scaling. There are are different ways to scale our content. Ideally we would want to use one application that would work for all but what if we wanted to create a custom build for a specific device. To do that we can rescale our content using the properties panel on flash. In this video we will show you how to scale your content in seconds with Adobe Flash CC.

Great we have a wicked app. Let's add a few more things to it. How about we make our newly created app a full screen app (one that hides the status bar). In the next step we will learn how to enable this functionality.

Until now it didn't really mater the version of our AIR that we are building in nor was the version that the use had but as you start building real world applications its going to become more and more important knowing the run time that the user has to enable specific capabilities that where only introduced in later air versions. In the next step of our training we will dig deeper into the world of understanding the device capabilities.

Now that we've been introduced to the concept of capabilities the next step is to understand what other basic capabilities can we get from our devices. This information will come handy as we move to part 3 where we build a full application.

That's it your done with part 2. Time to take a well deserved break before you move into part 3.

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