General Helpers

This section details the available ANE work arounds for current issues with Adobe AIR

Android Black Screen

While developing Android applications you may have run into an issue where the screen doesn't correctly render after an deactivate / activate cycle, for example, when another activity was launched and returned for your application.

This is quite common on Android 4.x when using Starling / Stage 3D

• https://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/starling-turns-into-black-screen
• https://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/maybe-context-loss
• https://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/resuming-using-eventactivate

These appear to be related to context loss however often they are not and for some reason the rendering of the 3D content just hasn't correctly resumed.

There are many hacks and solutions around, eg using a native extension to start and finish another activity:

• https://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/ane-fix-for-blackblank-screen-bug-when-returning-to-air-android-apps

however we found these to be a bit hacky.

Our solution is clean and will only result in a small delay of resuming from the activate event. It simply clears the AIR application and forces it to start rendering again.

We have used this in several applications with great success so we hope it works for your application.

Usage

To apply this fix, simply call the following in your application where you wish to apply the fix:

Application.service.blackScreenHelper();

Generally this is best placed in your applications ACTIVATE handler. However it is important to only call this after the AIR application is initialised so do not call it on the first ACTIVATE event, however any subsequent ACTIVATE events will be fine.

We normally use a flag to only call it when an activate event was preceeded by a deactivate event, eg:

private var _deactivated:Boolean = false;

private function deactivateHandler( event:Event ):void 
{
    _deactivated = true;
}

private function activateHandler( event:Event ):void 
{
    if (_deactivated)
    {
        _deactivated = false;
        Application.service.blackScreenHelper();
    }
}

Starling Context Loss Overlay

This functionality gives you the ability to add a screenshot over the application while you rebuild a context loss or something similar.

The functionality simply allows you to add a bitmap overlay over the AIR application

overlay = Starling.current.stage.drawToBitmapData();
            
Application.service.addBitmapOverlay( overlay );

To remove the overlay:

Application.service.removeBitmapOverlay();

AIR Android SDK 28 Back Button

If you are using AIR 33 latest release or higher this issue has been fixed.

AIR for Android when targeting SDK 28 caused an issue where the back button Keyboard Event failed to be dispatched.

This affects AIR 32 and early releases of AIR 33 from Harman when setting the target SDK to 28.

<uses-sdk android:targetSdkVersion="28" />

This can be resolved by calling the following early in your application:

Application.service.backButtonHelper();

Then the back button event should dispatch correctly:

NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener( KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, keyDownHandler );

function keyDownHandler( event:KeyboardEvent ):void
{
    trace( event.keyCode );
    if (event.keyCode == Keyboard.BACK)
    {
        event.preventDefault();
    }
}