Okay. You’re a developer who doesn’t want to go through all the hassle of learning additional programming languages and development tools to build an application for a mobile device. You build things in Flash. You’re quite good at it, and you value your sanity.
The good news is that Adobe provides a mobile application platform called Flash Lite. The name pretty much sums up the product: a very slimmed down version of Flash 8. Unfortunately, getting applications to run on the platform is a little less straightforward that the name implies.
The general process to get your application onto a device is as follows:
- Compile your SWF using the Flash CS3/CS4 IDE. Make sure your SWF is targetting Flash Lite and that the targetted Flash Lite version is compatible with the target device.
- Load the compiled SWF into the Adobe Mobile Packager. There are some additional libraries required when targetting different devices (i.e. for Nokia phones you need the Symbian SDK and an application to sign the SIS file that is created). Windows Mobile is a little more straightforward and requires you to install Microsoft Cabinet SDK.
- Package the application for your device as an SIS or CAB.
- Transfer the SIS or CAB file to your device via removable storage, cable, or bluetooth.
- Run the SIS or CAB file to install your application on your device.
There are also some gotchas when developing applications for Flash Lite (from my experience with Flash Lite 3.1):
- Not all devices that support Flash Lite are on the Adobe provided list of devices in Device Central. For example, my Dell Axim x50 PDA, which is a number of years old now and runs Windows Mobile 5 is not listed. This device is supposed to support Flash Lite 3.1. As a workaround I chose the Nokia 5800 as a ‘closest fit’, as it supports touchscreen input and shares that same screen resolution. Obviously the correct hardware keys for my device weren’t emulated, but the basic application works and responds to mouse input.
- Your physical device may not support certain types of audio such as MP3 from your devices file system. The easiest way to work around this problem is to load all audio for your application from the library of your SWF file, therefore ‘baking’ the audio into your SWF. The only drawback here is that it will increase your SWFs compile time.
- No filters or Bitmap transformation functionality is supported in Flash Lite.
- You have to use a cut down version of ActionScript 2.
- Video does not support alpha transparency, and there is no FLVPlayback component for Flash Lite 3.1.
- Embedded flash video may play very slowly on devices – it is recommended to use device video instead.
- There are significant differences between Flash Lite 1.0, Flash Lite 2.0 and Flash Lite 3.0 – you will need to check the Flash Lite documentation as to what these differences are.
Basically, if you want to quickly roll out simple applications to mobile devices without a huge learning curve, Flash Lite is the way to go. However if true rich-media experiences and ease of distribution are what you have in mind for your application, you may want to consider joining Apple’s iPhone Developer Program and target that platform instead.