I am building a widow AIR application. My application is transparent . I need to take a screenshot of my screen .Please help me in this
AIR cant do it directly; but it can be done by creating an Air Native Extension (ANE) to talk to the OS and grab the bitmap data.
Or you could try Native Process (not sure it ifs still part of AIR now that we have ANEs). Heres a tutorial on using Native Process to take a screenshot: http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play.php?id=125
Related
I was hoping to find an easy way to print PDFs that display from my flex developed mobile iphone app.
Doesn't look like Adobe has made this available on Air.
At this point, is there any way to print anything from a flex mobile app? Print screen or print bitmap?
Thanks!
Yes and no. It is not available through the AIR SDK in any shape or form on mobile (as of 3.7, anyway).
However, you can create an AIR Native Extension (a code base written in Objective-C or Java, depending on platform that connects through an AS3 library) that can do this. On my last project, we tasked one of our iOS devs to create an extension that allowed for the native "Open In" and "Sharing" menus to display and interact with data in an AIR app. Along with that share menu came the option to Print, depending on content. It worked great and did exactly as we had hoped. I am sure you could build one that only did this with the print menu and did not do the full Share menu if needed.
I will warn you, however, that native extensions are not easy to create by any means. It involves knowing a separate language, using poorly documented libraries from Adobe, and command line work. Additionally, an iOS ANE must be created on OS X in XCode. There is no way (that I know of, at least) to create it in Windows or Linux.
Is there a way to take screenshot of the client's window using flex?
I found an example which uses java bridge, but i am looking for different solution.
Do you want to take a snapshot of the users screen? OR just of the AIR App?
If you want to take a screencap of the user's screen, I'd look into NitroScreenCap. The 'generic' approach they use is that they wrote native code for each operating system and pack it up with the AIR app using a NativProcess. I guess you could try to implement that yourself if needed.
If you just need a screencap of the Flex app; do some Googling. You can get the BitMapData of any given Flex Component and turn that into an image. Here are a few links that come up:
http://blog.flexexamples.com/2007/11/16/taking-screenshots-in-flex-using-the-imagesnapshotcaptureimage-method/
http://dougmccune.com/blog/2007/06/03/save-a-snapshot-image-of-a-flex-app-without-a-server/
http://www.mehtanirav.com/taking-a-snapshot-of-flex-app-from-flex/
Is there any way where i can create a thumbnail image from a flash movie file(flv /swf) [NOT FROM A VIDEO File ] in ASP.NET ? Any samples of implementation ?
you can use ffmpeg to create thumbnails of the flash video
For .flv you can use ffmpeg to convert parts of the video (e.g. one frame) into an image (sequence)
I've used it as command-line application by calling Process.Start(), but there is at least one wrapper for .NET (I haven't tested it myself):
http://www.codeplex.com/ffmpegdotnet
For .swf I don't know any way to achieve this without some Adobe tool.
for flv it can be done easily, as others mentioned ...
for swf, it depends HIGHLY on the swf ... if the swfs visual appearence is determined by code, there is no other way than to embed a flash player in you app and either let the flash player make the snapshots, encode them as JPEG/PNG, and send them somewhere using TCP or LocalConnection (a flash<->flash communication connection, which can be used with C# as well) or try to somehow grab its output buffer yourself ... the first possibility should be no more than 10-20 lines of actionscript code ... don't know about the latter ...
other than that, you might use an external command line converter ... there are a few floating around the web ...
greetz
back2dos
Take a look at this article, it should point you in the right direction. It uses SharpFFmpeg to extract thumbnail images from movie clips from a variety of formats.
the only way to get an image, is to use a full flash client that starts playing and allows you to capture the first frame.
I would take a close look at flirt (they actually have an example that renders pngs)
Maybe some of the other flash libraries may be of help ( swfdec gnash swift tools gplflash)
Gnash is probably the best choice since its the most mature project out there, but i do not know how easy it is to integrate into command line tools or into your own projects.
We have been working on this in my company, and we got a proof of concept working pretty fast (but the project we made it for is on hold right now). I am not able to share the code, but I can give you some pointers.
It is not pure ASP.NET, but maybe you can still use it. We made a windows service that can be called from ASP.NET.
Basicly you install the flash plugin on the server, the windows services can then simply open the swf through the swf ActiveX component and then you can grap a picture of the whole thing. It works pretty well, notice that you do not have to actually render the ActiveX component on screen to capture the picture.
Check out this post. It does not tell you everything but I guess it provides the ground work required for it. You probably have to figure out how to get the object tag out of the flash-html you are trying to download from a web page. After that you'd have to figure out when to capture the frames. Its a long ride however. You don't need the asp.net part. Just concentrate on the windows project part. Hope this helps. :)
I recently started to develop using Flex 3 and Adobe Air and I wanted to know what features you want to be in futures releases of Adobe Air ?
The ones that I miss are:
Cross-systems way of launching a local file (shellExec) right from an Air application (although you can do this using workaround at least under Windows)
Ability to setup dynamic paths for Embed statement (e.g. Embed[(variable+"/path/to/file")] ). I didn't find any way to do this properly.
Some way of setting Flex object's positions with absolute values from CSS (that sounds more Flex related by the way)
Don't hesitate to add your workarounds to theses limitations if you know somes.
Ability to call out to native code - you currently have to ship a server written in another language and make calls to that to do anything more than Air gives you.
Modal windows. There's a hack you can do which involves setting Application.application.enabled = false, setting dialog.nativeWindow.alwaysInFront = true and then re-enabling the application when the dialog closes, but this is long-winded and doesn't disable any native menus you may have! It's crazy that something so simple is made so difficult.
A usable way to set the application's icon. I spent 2 hours trying to do this the other day and gave up after persistent "303" errors that gave me no idea of what I was doing wrong. Again, really basic stuff.
"Call native code", "Modal windows", agree-agree.
loadLibrary would be really great :)
ps.:
if we can not have this features in AIR, if would be awesome to have an opportunity to embed flash(AIR) graphics engine into your own app. in that case we'll get great performance improvement and liberty of choice what to write (not only small gadgets).
Looking for a way to display a PDF in Flex. I'm sure there are several ways. Looking for the easiest to maintain / integrate / most user friendly. I'm guessing it's possible to display a browser window in the app and render it, but if it goes off of IE / FireFox it's not acceptable for this project.
Thanks...
This looks like a nice PDF viewer for flex http://www.devaldi.com/?p=212
We just did a large AIR app that used PDF quite a bit - make sure you save yourself some heartache and write some code to check the acrobat version or that it's even installed - if they don't have it you won't get an error, just a blank HTML control.
I know, it sounds obvious, but still...
Sorry to say so, but convertion PDF to kind of swf of flash things... doesn't that kill the PDF thoughts ?
I mean, PDF should be electronic paper right ? When creating a SWF file out of it, you just destroy that. No more editing, no more filling out a form.
The strange thing is, that PDF is an Adobe product... and Flex (Flash Builder) is a Adobe product.
Two products that Adobe wants to be world dominator off. But combining PDF into Flex... is not standard.
Check out: http://www.swftools.org/ for tools to convert your PDF to SWF, speifically pdf2swf- http://www.swftools.org/pdf2swf.html
Check out Share on Acrobat.com, there you can upload PDFs and make them embedable Flash files (sort of like YouTube for documents). Should be possible to load those into Flex. Not an ideal solution, but unfortunately you need to convert the PDF to an SWF somehow to be able to load it into a Flex application. I don't know of any good tools that do this. If someone else knows please share.
If you target AIR you can load a PDF into a HTML view, but that doesn't work when running in the browser (the HTML component is only available in AIR).
in Adobe Digital Edition, Adobe Load PDFs into flash (if you check the main file .exe you can see it), without any convert. therefore i think it is possible to do.
i decompiled it and found lot of classes related to pdf but i can't run it after recompiled it :(
if you solve this problem you should focus the Adobe Digital Edition product.
Oh sweet, this is an air app. I'll go with the HTML view. I can't convert them to SWF because the client will be uploading the files.
if AIR Application,
use HTMLLoader().