Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Chapter 9. Camera

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

—Dorothea Lange

Now that mobile devices and cameras are one and the same device, everyone is a photographer. With mobile devices running email and SMS applications, everyone is also a publisher.

If you want to create an application that uses or creates pictures, you can do so by accessing some of the Android APIs. For instance, you can access the Gallery application, also called the Media Library, to select and display an image. You can add an image to the Gallery from AIR. You also can open the native camera to take a picture or shoot a video. And as we will discuss in this chapter, you can do all of this from within your AIR application.

The Gallery Application and the CameraRoll Class

The Gallery application is the display for the repository of images located on the SD card and accessible by various applications. Launch it, choose an image, and then select Menu→Share. A list of applications (such as Picasa, Messaging, and Email) appears, a convenient way to upload media from the device to another destination (see Figure 9-1).

Figure 9-1. The Gallery application

The flash.media.CameraRoll class is a subclass of the EventDispatcher class. It gives you access to the Gallery. It is not supported for AIR desktop applications.

Note

When the native camera application launches, it looks for the SD card. ...