While we primarily develop our iOS apps at WeeWorld using Objective-C, we are open to alternative technologies. Here’s a little iPad game we put together as part of our evaluation of Adobe AIR. Doppelgänger is a port of a Flash-based browser game we released on WeeWorld last year and seemed like a natural fit for the iPad’s spacious touch-screen. It’s a simple game concept; the player has to race against the clock to spot the matching WeeMee from the crowd.
One of the major advantages of using AIR for this was that we got the full benefit of Flash’s vector rendering engine. With each WeeMee being randomly generated from a pool of 150 assets, it was essential we keep the final size of the app down. Using vector-based assets let us do that and also ensure we could scale the WeeMee’s without a loss of fidelity.
Everything went fairly smoothly but one feature missing from AIR that we found we really need is the ability to use native UI components and elements – it’s simply too much work to fake these things up in Flash. We got lucky with Doppelgänger but there are so many other similar mobile projects at WeeWorld that we simply can’t consider using AIR for because of this omission. Would be great to hear from Adobe if this is likely to change any time soon as it could really extend AIR’s reach.
So there you have it. A nice little prototype app that was put together in a very short space of time. The video shows Doppelgänger running on iPad 2, but it runs just as well on iPad 1 too.
AIR Native Extensions will take care of providing you a way of using Objective-C libraries to show UIAlerts and other components available through the iOS SDKs.