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Ciao to everyone, my name is Alessandro Pace, if you want to know more about me here a short bio.
My expertise is Flash Lite for mobile phones, been developing mobile content for the past 4 years using this mobile technology. You can follow my blog for more insight on Flash Lite and mobile technologies.
Why Flash Lite?
Two main reasons:
- developing content using Flash Lite is easy
- development cost and time is much less then other mobile technologies
These are the most important point of mobile development. Currently there 800 millions Flash Lite enabled devices, 90 percent of which are mobile phones. Adobe is projecting to reach 1 Billions by the Q1 2009, and forecast is to ship another 1.5 Billions Flash Lite enabled mobile devices in the next 2 years.
At the moment Adobe Flash Lite for mobile phones is the second mobile platform after J2ME, quite an achievement. The other great statistic is that next year, Adobe Flash Lite will pass Flash on the web as number of installed runtimes. Here is some statistics of Flash Lite by OEM and regions.
But not everything is easy as it seems. The major problem is the attitude of developers approaching Flash Lite development. Most developers approaching Flash Lite come from the web world, mostly doing Flash development.
The first issue they encounter is that the Flash Lite runtime is not the same as the one on the web, for obvious reasons, Flash Lite runs on mobile devices with very different hardwares.
The second issue is that developing for mobile phones is much more complex compared to the web. Not only from a technical point of view but also from a distribution and business point of view.
The most difficult aspect of mobile development is distribution. There are many entities that are involved that sometimes is frustrating. But as a mobile developer you must deal and understand these processes to make a successful breakthrough in mobile development.
So my quick tip to Flash developers approaching the Flash Lite world, consider yourself a mobile developer first and then a Flash Lite developer. There are plenty of documentation on mobile developer programs sites such as Forum Nokia and others, it's a must read for anyone approaching the mobile world. I also have a list of Flash Lite articles and tutorials on my blog.
Next week I will be attending the Adobe MAX 2008 developer conference in San Francisco and if you are attending I highly suggest you to look at the many mobile dedicated sessions.
Alessandro
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Hi, Alessandro Pace, I really know your blog and that is what I read everyday, what I want to know is that whether will I do Flash Lite with ActionScript 3.0, not 2.0, for I am using AS3.0 from Flash, and when can we in the future? Thanks!
Seconded - when will we see Flex 3 / ActionScript 3 support on Flash Lite? The older formats are useless to me.
Ciao,
thanks for the comment.
As you probably know, AS3 is possible because the Flahs player has 2 VM. So until Adobe does not port the AS 3 VM to Flash Lite we won't see it.
Also, if you try to do some Flash Lite development with AS2 and using heavy OO programming you will see that it's not the best choice, for a simple reason, you will not be able to reach the most number of Flash Lite enabled devices because the hardware might vary a lot in performance.
So I suggest you to give it a try with Flash Lite 3 and AS2 and see how mobile development with Flash Lite on different devices. You will have a lot of surprises !
I personally do not use much OO programming beside specific APIs, for the reason I mention above. The great thing of Flash Lite is that you can create content that can run on multiple platforms without any changes.
Alessandro
i really want flash lite for my mobile phone
Too bad there's no AS3 for Flash Lite 3. That takes out all the business application development possible with Flex 3. I can't find an indication anywhere that AS3 will be available for Flash Lite.
@websailor:
To chaé! I wish there was support for AS3 in flashlite. I have the 5800 XpressMusic and it has flashlite 3.1 but most embedded flash videos will not play because they require AS3. Thus i cannot watch this videos period on the phone and there is no app (.sis) that will allow the flv to play on this phone because it is a touch screen and many apps are not compatable with the phone. Including that mobitube app and emTube -these are not supported and so i am asking if anyone knows and way to play flashvideo from a site using just the web page's url? An app for the 5800 or something? Maybe flashlite 3.x will support AS3?!
Hi there! I agree with you two, i think there´s lot of people developing in AS3. I have the same phone and still waiting for a version of Flash Lite that support As3. Nice Blog!
Hi - I am developing Flash Lite Screensavers. I am publishing them for the Flash 7 player which corresponds to Flash Lite 2.x (I think). I am testing them on my N95. They work fine, but apparently not on a N70. My question: Is there a way of simulating the various mobile platforms for testing purposes? Can one have the various Flash Lite versions installed on my laptop for testing or does one need to test on an actual mobile? Ulf
Hello - I am writing actionscripts for screensavers for mobile phones. The problem is all the various phones and the different versions of Flash Lite. My distributor wants naturally as many as possible of my screensavers to work on Flash Lite 1.x to allow for a greater market.
My question is:
Are there ways of testing a swf file on a virtual flash lite player that would correspond to a certain phone. I have noticed that screensavers are particularly fussy. They do not allow sound or to read an external txt file. They also will not work if an imported jpg is too large even if the swf will work on the phone without having it assigned as a screensaver.
I am publishing my screensavers for the flash 7 player which coresponds to the flash lite 2.x player. Is there a difference in publishing it as flash 7 or flash lite 2.x? I get a lot of error messages when publishing it as flash lite.
Ulf