Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Chapter 5. Evaluating Device Capabilities and Handling Multiple Devices

The multitude which does not reduce itself to unity is confusion.

—Blaise Pascal

The premise of mobile AIR is to enable you to create one concept, one code base, and a set of assets to deploy an application on multiple devices effortlessly. AIR for mobile accomplishes this for the most part, but not without challenges. There is a disparity in performance and capabilities among devices, and deploying for a range of screen resolutions requires effort and time even if your art is minimal.

In the near future, mobile devices will approach, and perhaps surpass, the performance of desktop machines. Until then, you must adapt your development style to this limited environment. Every line of code and every asset should be scrutinized for optimization. The AIR runtime has been optimized for devices with limited resources, but this is no guarantee that your code will run smoothly. This part is your responsibility.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to evaluate device capabilities. We will then discuss how to handle multiple screens and orientations.

Hardware

The multitude of Android devices available today makes it difficult to evaluate them all. The subsections that follow discuss the major factors to examine. If you want to know about a specific phone, or if you would like a complete list of Android devices, visit these websites:

http://pdadb.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Android_devices

http://phandroid.com/phones/ ...