as3 Adobe Air access iPad device camera - actionscript-3

Question

Is there a way you can use as3 to access iPad's camera?
I mean start the Camera within the app itself
have ability take a shoot and save the image to byteArray and applying the image to the background or doing some manipulation
I have done some research most of them just showing how to access the android devices.
Thanks for any suggestion or help.

Answer 1

Yes, you can absolutely do this. The beauty of Flash is that the code to do it is the same that you would use on Android or a PC.
Literally, you can do this to connect the camera to a Video object:
var camera:Camera = Camera.getCamera();
var video=new Video();
video.attachCamera(camera);
this.addChild(video); // 'this' would be a Sprite or UIComponent, etc...
There's a lot more to do if you want to do something useful, but it's fairly straight forward once you get started :)

Answer 2

bluebill1049, I'm not certain from the thread if you got what you were looking for, but I did see your request for the whole class. I found the same information (that Jason Sturges posted in his answer) in this post.
take photo using Adobe Builder (flex) for iOS
Unlike his reply here, his reply to that post had had a link to a great tutorial on building a mobile app and it was from that tutorial that this code was lifted/quoted. It requires an event class (event.CameraEvent - only a few lines) that's contained in that project/tutorial so it's important to be able to go back to the source, as it were. That source is located here:
http://devgirl.org/files/RIAUnleashed/
My thanks to Jason. Just so you don't have to dig, here's the event class that's missing from the quote:
package events
{
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.filesystem.File;
public class CameraEvent extends Event
{
public static const FILE_READY:String = "fileReady";
public var file:File;
public function CameraEvent(type:String, file:File=null, bubbles:Boolean = true, cancelable:Boolean = true)
{
super(type, bubbles, cancelable);
this.file = file;
}
}
}
Hope that helps!

Answer 3

Using the loader is not the only way to access the image bytes on iOS. It turns out the data is already in JPEG format to begin with, so encoding it again is not necessary.
Just do a mediaPromise.open() to get at the bytes and save them directly instead.

Answer 4

XpenseIt example code offers this camera implementation:
Class: CameraUtil:
package utils
{
import events.CameraEvent;
import flash.display.BitmapData;
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.display.LoaderInfo;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
import flash.events.MediaEvent;
import flash.filesystem.File;
import flash.filesystem.FileMode;
import flash.filesystem.FileStream;
import flash.media.CameraRoll;
import flash.media.CameraUI;
import flash.media.MediaPromise;
import flash.media.MediaType;
import flash.utils.ByteArray;
import mx.events.DynamicEvent;
import mx.graphics.codec.JPEGEncoder;
[Event(name = "fileReady", type = "events.CameraEvent")]
public class CameraUtil extends EventDispatcher
{
protected var camera:CameraUI;
protected var loader:Loader;
public var file:File;
public function CameraUtil()
{
if (CameraUI.isSupported)
{
camera = new CameraUI();
camera.addEventListener(MediaEvent.COMPLETE, mediaEventComplete);
}
}
public function takePicture():void
{
if (camera)
camera.launch(MediaType.IMAGE);
}
protected function mediaEventComplete(event:MediaEvent):void
{
var mediaPromise:MediaPromise = event.data;
if (mediaPromise.file == null)
{
// For iOS we need to load with a Loader first
loader = new Loader();
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loaderCompleted);
loader.loadFilePromise(mediaPromise);
return;
}
else
{
// Android we can just dispatch the event that it's complete
file = new File(mediaPromise.file.url);
dispatchEvent(new CameraEvent(CameraEvent.FILE_READY, file));
}
}
protected function loaderCompleted(event:Event):void
{
var loaderInfo:LoaderInfo = event.target as LoaderInfo;
if (CameraRoll.supportsAddBitmapData)
{
var bitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(loaderInfo.width, loaderInfo.height);
bitmapData.draw(loaderInfo.loader);
file = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath("receipt" + new Date().time + ".jpg");
var stream:FileStream = new FileStream()
stream.open(file, FileMode.WRITE);
var j:JPEGEncoder = new JPEGEncoder();
var bytes:ByteArray = j.encode(bitmapData);
stream.writeBytes(bytes, 0, bytes.bytesAvailable);
stream.close();
trace(file.url);
dispatchEvent(new CameraEvent(CameraEvent.FILE_READY, file));
}
}
}
}