android

Feeding Android browsers accelerometer data via Flash by Paulo Fierro

In a forthcoming blogpost I'll talk about not only the awesome Flash on the Beach conference that just flew by but also the web-app we built for it at fotb.me.

In one of the many bar chats, I was talking to Paul King about our experience building it and he asked if we'd played around with the accelerometer data. I said we had, albeit briefly and I incorrectly stated that we had gotten it working on iOS, Android and PlayBook.

iOS 4.2+ devices support the DeviceMotion API and so does the PlayBook. The only gotchas is that instead of listening for the devicemotion event you have to hook into the window.ondevicemotion function itself for this to work on the PlayBook.

For Android phones I quickly threw together a SWF that would simply listen to a flash.sensors.Accelerometer instance and then send those over ExternalInterface to a JavaScript handler which then takes it from there.

This is an extremely basic example, but all the code is on GitHub so get it there or check the demo. Since the PlayBook supports both Flash and devicemotion a simple check is done so we don't get the data twice.

It should go without saying that if your Android phone doesn't have Flash installed then you get nothing.