Last week I decided to look into building a native extension for AIR and was very surprised by the lack of quality resources and tutorials for doing so. I was able to find examples for Android using Java and for iOS using Objective-C, but pretty much nothing for a standard Windows C++ project. I was eventually able to get things up and running by piecing together bits of information from various sources, but I thought I'd take the time to write a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this so that perhaps others will have an easier time. In this tutorial you will create a native extension that simply adds two numbers together and returns the sum. (more...)

Out of all the articles and tutorials I've written, by far the most popular have been the Flash and Kinect pieces. Since the February 1st release of the version 1 Kinect SDK, I've gotten quite a few questions about how to get Flash working with Kinect again. Many readers were having trouble with the old tutorials which no longer work as they were based on the beta release of the SDK. I decided to take a break from my current project this weekend and throw together a quick Kinect to Flash demonstration with the new SDK. This isn't a tutorial, but you can download the source files and see how it was made! (more...)

If you've read my previous posts then you know I have been working with Microsoft's Kinect SDK for Windows. One of my goals from the start was to integrate Kinect with Flash and earlier this week I was successful in doing just that! I used a technique similar to what the Blitz Agency had done when the Prime Sense Kinect drivers were released earlier this year.

The concept is pretty simple: Kinect tracks the user's hand, sends the position data to a server and that server sends the data to Flash. I started by writing a very simple server with Node.js and then modified the skeletal tracking demo from the channel9 site to send data to the server using a standard socket. The only thing left to do then was set up an swf file to accept data from the server and use that data to move around a cursor. I'll post something more in-depth on this later, but for now you can check out the video below to see it in action!