Multitouch with Actionscript 3 and AIR 2.0

AIR 2.0 is out with a BETA version on labs since a couple of weeks ago more or less.
It introduces a lots of new features like UDP protocol, Socket server implementation, access to raw micrhophone data, multitouch and gesture support and so on.

When I see multitouch and gesture support I start to think how many devices are touchscreen based and they are growing a lots in those months, so I start to investigate about that features.
First of all I suggest to read a cool article on devnet made by Christian Cantrell, he goes in deep about this new features and give you a lots of information about Multitouch, TouchEvent and gestures.
It’s so interesting because you can see compatibility of that features with different OS also.

In this post, I’d like to share with you a little sample on how you can create an AIR 2.0 application with Flash Builder and test it with a macbook trackpad.
In fact, you can use macbook trackpad gesture because they are supported on AIR and it’s so interesting, for example, if you want to test an application for new Wacom Bamboo pen & touch and you haven’it.
Wacom Bamboo has a new AS3 SDK for Flex and Flash that allow you to work with multitouch and gesture too, it could be so interesting if you don’t have a multitouch for an expo and you want to buy a cheap solution to give a cool interaction for your possible new clients.
Bamboo has also the availability to create “minis” that are applications dedicated to Wacom Bamboo, but you can read more at Wacom developer website.

So, in this sample we load an external image and we use gesture to try our macbook trackpad:

package {


import flash.ui.Multitouch;
import flash.ui.MultitouchInputMode;
import flash.events.TransformGestureEvent;
import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.display.MovieClip;
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
import flash.events.Event;


public class MultiTouchSample {


Multitouch.inputMode = MultitouchInputMode.GESTURE;
private var sq:Sprite;


public function MultiTouchSample() {


sq = new Sprite()
addChild(sq);


this.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_ZOOM, scaleObj);
this.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_PAN, panObj);
this.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_ROTATE, rotObj);


var l:Loader = new Loader();
l.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, addImg);
l.load(new URLRequest("img/sample.jpg"));
}


private function addImg(e:Event):void{
sq.addChild(e.target.content);
sq.scaleY = sq.scaleX = .2;
}


private function rotObj(e:TransformGestureEvent):void{
sq.rotation += e.rotation;
}


private function panObj(e:TransformGestureEvent):void{
sq.x += e.offsetX * 2;
sq.y += e.offsetY * 2;
}


private function scaleObj(e:TransformGestureEvent):void{
sq.scaleX *= e.scaleX;
sq.scaleY *= e.scaleY;
}
}
}

You can see that is so simple work with gesture, a couple of suggestions before starting work with them:

• remember to verify which gesture are supported on your system, more information you can read on devnet article about multitouch and gesture
• TransformGestureEvent is event class dedicated to gesture
• you can use TouchEvent also

Feel free to leave a comment and thank you to visit this blog.