By Andrew Lim on Sunday, 28th February 2010

There’s nothing like a good hack to keep you entertained on a Sunday. Today we bring you news of two Actionscript developers who have hacked an Android phone and Nintendo DS to control Adobe AIR apps.

Jeff Winder explains that AIR 2.0 has “support for UDP sockets, which allows you to send and receive messages using the universal datagram protocol. This means that you can communicate with other applications without the need of an extra server.” Winder made the AIR app listen for UDP messages sent by the Android apps to control a paperplane – turning his Android phone into a game controller (video below).

From Winder’s blog post: “RemoteDroid has just been open sourced, which gave me a chance to take a look at the source code of the Android app. I added the acceleration data of the phone to it and in the video you can see how I control the speed of the paperplane by pitching the phone, steer the paperplane by rolling the phone, zoom in and out by pressing the left ‘button’ on the phone’s touch screen.”

In addition to Jeff’s hack, a comment at the bottom of his blog post from another Actionscript developer, nicknamed bioRex21, highlights another ingenious use for AIR. bioRex21 managed to use a Nintendo DS and Adobe AIR to create a simple drawing application (video below).