Thursday 29 April 2010

Mixtikl Airplay port - to Android/Symbian

I've been porting Mixtikl to Qt and Airplay DK in parallel.

Now that the Qt port is done, I've also got the Airplay SDK port running in the ARM debugger emulator.

I've yet to add the audio hooks, and there are a couple of rough edges, but I'm looking forward to trying it all out in a few days on my HTC Hero Android phone!

Due to a weird problem with the Airplay SDK, I'm unable to link for X86 target (I'm waiting for a solution at http://airplaysdk.com/node/761). The same code builds fine however for the ARM Debugger - so at least I'm able to make progress. :)

The documentation has been pretty frustrating, so here are two useful tips to save you time!
- to blend-in an image, use Iw2DSetAlphaMode() to set a colour with the appropriate alpha channel setting before calling Iw2DDrawImage(); the alpha colour setting is used to blend the bitmap! Also, set the rgb values to other than 255, to scale the colour; useful to draw a white coloured bitmap in different colours, for example.
- if you want to clip, then call IwGxSetScissorScreenSpace(...) to define a clip window before any calls to Iw2D*(...).

The routine to query for pointer support didn't work for me - maybe I made the call wrong - I'm having to ignore the result from that call, I need to raise that in the forum once my build issue is resolved. :)

Anyways, Mixtikl now runs on the ARM emulator, so the next step is to complete the audio hooks and try on Android and Symbian devices!

Note: lack of support in Airplay for threads and clipboard will cut-back on some of the Mixtikl functionality for now on Android/Symbian... until those items are exposed in future Airplay updates!

No comments: