KEEP_AWAKE, but turn off screen to save battery? - actionscript-3

I have built a fun little MP3 player using FlashDevelop and Flash CS5.5 IDE (no Flex).
The app 'emulates' old school style radio by fading tracks from any chosen m3u playlist while interspersing random radio stabs, silly fake ads and dj chatter (much like Flash FM from GTA Vice City).
The app itself works very well, however, if I set SystemIdleMode.NORMAL the app stops when the screen saver kicks in, and when I set to SystemIdleMode.KEEP_AWAKE, the screen never kicks in and the app runs until the battery dies ... which unfortunately doesn't take too long ;)
Is it possible to 'disable' the screen while leaving the app running to help save battery?
If no, can I at least control brightness, and perhaps display a black overlay? Would this have much effect on battery life?
Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated.
Cheers.

Related

FirefoxOS packaged game loading time

We are working on a packaged html5 game for the FirefoxOS marketplace.
Our game passes review, except the game shows a black screen before starting. The reviewers said this black screen shows for a very long time. It is my belief that the games wrapper is trying to load ALL assets before it shows the game.
The problem is, our game already has internal loaders that load portions of the game assets. Does anybody know how to tell the FirefoxOS packaged html5 app to let the game do all of the loading, so my preloaders can work?
I also use Flambe. Befor it can display anything, it should load at least the index.html, flambe.js (flambe project loader) and ofcourse main-html.js file (actual game code). From that point you could load other assets to display an actual preloader, but that could also take time. If you use FillSprites then it reduces some time.
But what I mostly do, is adding a simple CSS3 animation (loader) on top of the canvas. I give this html element a certain id, and when I have loaded enough to show the "real" preloader, I remove this CSS loader animation from the DOM. This allows to show a preloader very fast or to load a bit more designed preloader if you wish.

AS3: Recording sound as they are output/played

I understand how to record microphone input in AS3 from this doc.
Is it possible to record sound exactly as they are being output/played?
The reason is I applied some sound transform (via the global SoundMixer) to sounds that are currently playing; and I also want to record this sound data while it is being played.
I just saw this question, to clarify, I am not trying to record just all sounds on the user's computer (which is not possible). My flash app has a Youtube player in it (via their AS3 API), and it's playing some sounds. I applied transforms using SoundMixer.soundTransform, and I want to record what's being played when the user is playing it.
Thanks in advance.
Just a passing suggestion.. on my desktop it seems ABLE to record sound into Flash from a different tab playing Youtube (HTML5).. I don't know how it's doing that!!
I allow microphone here.. (none actually plugged in, and speaker out has in-ear headphones)
http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/create-a-useful-audio-recorder-app-in-actionscript-3--active-5836
PS: Anyone trying this must reduce Windows volume since anything above 10-20% is distorted audio into the Flash app.
And this HTML5 youtube trailer was recorded fine into the Wav file produced by Flash app above
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVt32qoyhi0
So after a quick search it seems my Realtek Audio is classed as a Full-Duplex soundcard and also within its own control panel I have an option called "Multi-streaming" which is enabled/ticked. I think Full-Duplex is enough to do this though. Try options within your soundcard's own settings software. Don't know about your end-users. Some hardware will do it, some wont, there is no all-round solution outside of AIR (which makes desktop apps out of your AS3 code).

Windows phone 8: how to play background next song?

I'm programming an app which is able to play music in background. I'm using mediaplayer and Song(class xnalib), well since is not possible put file into mediaplayer.queue I can't figure out how can play next song in the "playlist".
I'll try to make this scenario more clear with an example:
I play music with mediaplayer: MediaPlayer.Play(MysongArray[CurrentIndex]);
well now user put my app in background.
but when MysongArray[CurrentIndex] song is ended how play next song if my application is in background?
thanks
That's probably because you are playing a Song not a SongCollection - once it's ended it stops playing. Source: MSDN1, MSDN2. I belive (thounght I've not tried it) that you should create SongCollection (if it's possible) or Manage existing one. But this can be a hard job as #ToniPetrina answered here.
As for me I would consider using Background Audio Player and How to play.
Maybe this will help if you decide to use BAP - example how to use playlist.
You cannot do that since background player can only stream or play from isolated storage. You cannot play songs from MediaLibrary.

How to build iOS7 Style Audio Recorder App

I am trying to build an audio recorder app similar to iOS7 built in one and looking for guidance on what controls to use for the recording app. I understand I will be using a tableview for the list of previous recordings and a UIView for the top recording view and on tapping record adjust the table view and move down the black recording view.
How should I implement the endless horizontal scrolling view? Should I use a collection view and keep adding elements to the model array as the time increments. Also what should I use for the timer. Is there something like setInterval for Objective C like in Javascript that I can use to keep updating the UI at regular time interval?
If someone also knows of a cocoa pod or sample code that would be greatly appreciated.
For recording the simplest audiorecorder is AVAudioRecorder. Here is a simple implementation of an audio recording app: https://github.com/calmez/Recorder. AVAudioRecorder has simple metering methods where you can read volume output of the channels
Honestly though, Apple would probably use CoreAudio to get the audio because it is more optimized. Novocaine is a good core audio engine that could get you started https://github.com/alexbw/novocaine
For rendering the waveform, I would guess that Apple probably uses OpenGL. I don't see how to do it easily and efficiently otherwise. You could draw them using the standard drawing APIs for UIView like this project does (https://github.com/fulldecent/FDWaveformView) but I don't see this animating well.
For the timer, there is NSTimer

Flash CS3 (AS3) is giving my graphics (buttons and movieclips) outlines

So, I'm pretty much a beginner in Flash and Actionscript (using AS3, as I said in the title), and I'm trying to make a basic escape the room game. I haven't gotten far, and right now that's because every time I test my game (or publish preview it) the graphics get this annoying outline. Here it is when tested: http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn228/chokingondrama/flash.png
Every outline corresponds to some object present in the game, most of which have an alpha component of 0 since they're on different sides of the room. This didn't happen before, but once I added the code that allowed the player to change their view with the arrow (each viewpoint/wall is a different frame) these appeared.
It's a little different when published to HTML, basically it just gives each image a white background: http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn228/chokingondrama/html.png
Also, it would be nice if somebody could give me advice on how to make sure importing to flash won't result in lower quality.
Thanks in advance. If needed, I'll post any part of the code.
Some tips:
Don't set alpha to 0, instead use the visible property, setting movieclip.visible = false will make it a lot more efficient.
As for the importing and quality, after you import to stage or library, bring up the library (ctrl + l), and right click on the file you imported, go to properties. If it's an image, set compression to lossless, and allow smoothing.
For audio, go to file-> publish settings, and change audio stream and audio event (whichever you might use) to 128kbps.
As for your main question, I need more info, if you want you can post your source. It might be because of how you are placing your graphics on the stage.
For each of your MovieClips in question:
Try disabling button mode and see if the rectangles go away.
movieClipName.buttonMode = false;
If that doesn't help, or you really want button mode, try setting
movieClipName.tabEnabled = false;
There's a chance that since you added keyboard interaction each of your MovieClips are now expecting to be selected by the user when they press the tab key, much like any normal web form.
tabEnabled in the docs
You could also try
movieClipName.focusRect = false;
focusRect in the docs