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Let me first explain the vagueness of this title. Throughout the book, I use “Macromedia” when referring to Flash releases prior to 2006, and “Adobe” for those thereafter. The “Macromedia” name has been sitting in front of the word “Flash” for the past six years, but times have changed, and you are about to see just how!

Most of the development of mobile applications, of course, takes place not on the device itself but in a specially created development environment on your computer. It’s also possible to applications, to a certain extent, on that same computer using emulators and, in the case of Flash, the Flash stand-alone player. Testing applications for mobile devices on desktop computers makes it easy to forget that your platform—the mobile phone, PDA, or other device—may behave very differently. The IDE and emulators may offer little more than a rough approximation of how your application runs in the wild. In a worst-case scenario, your application may even cease to function at all when transferred to the device, leaving you poised for an all-night debugging session immediately before launch. Before opening Flash and before you even plan your application, the target platform should be very clear in your mind, including any features, limitations, and problems that might arise when dealing with that platform.

Flash Lite is Adobe’s flagship application in the mobile world. Like its big brother the desktop Flash player, the Flash Lite player provides a feature-rich platform for delivering multimedia experiences over a range of devices from mobile phones to set-top boxes. Although Flash Lite 1.1 doesn’t support of the functionality of the desktop profile, the same underlying features, including vectors, bitmap graphics, MP3 sound, and a flexible scripting engine, provide more than enough power to create versatile and engaging mobile applications. However, Flash Lite 2 (see Chapter 4) does allow for the use of ActionScript 2 and should prove much less alien to those of you already accustomed to creating Flash content for the Web. It’s important to note that the Flash Lite player, like the desktop player, always plays content created for a previous version, so content authored for Flash Lite 1.1 can be played without any modifications in the Flash Lite 2 player.

The last chapter included an introduction to Flash Lite in general and offered an in-depth look at the first globally available version of the player, Flash Lite 1.1. This chapter looks into the next major and minor versions of the Flash Lite Player and the myriad changes that have taken place between them and their predecessor. Before you start to think that reading the last chapter might have been a waste of time, , the Flash Lite 2.0 and 2.1 players play back Flash 1.1 movies with 100 percent backward compatibility. Add to that the length of time it took the Flash 1.1 player to go from developer release to being found on a viable number of publicly available handsets, and you can see that you can get very comfortable with Flash Lite 1.1 for the foreseeable future, with all of your accumulated knowledge being directly applicable to Flash Lite 2.X development when you are ready to make the transition.

Until now, we have discussed both applications and games rather generally. This chapter will focus squarely on applications for mobile devices, from tax calculators to e-mail clients—all of these things are possible with Flash and Flash Lite. Although the majority of applications are created for business users (for productivity, travel, and finance), many areas have yet to be explored. This chapter will give you a better understanding of how to go about creating applications, from the design of the UI to loading the data, so you can use this information to put new ideas into action. Although I cover both Flash Lite 1.1 and 2.X in this chapter, I tend to focus a little more on Flash 1.1, because that version will be the prominent one to develop for to maintain the largest viewership across the board for at least a year to come.

Mobile gaming is Every year, the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC) in San Francisco (www.gdconf.com) brings together something in the region of 10,000 developers for a week-long event. In 2005, the GDC opened itself to the mobile gaming arena with GDC Mobile (www.gdconf.com/conference/gdcmobile.htm), an event geared specifically for mobile game developers to teach, to learn, and to discuss the future of the industry. Shortly after that, big players such as Electronic Arts started to look into taking a piece of this pie; EA began developing games for mobile devices and created a mobile division, EA Mobile. By this time, THQ and Midway were already sporting a pair of veteran wings with an acclaimed mobile gaming history, which gives a very good indication that mobile gaming was, and still is, a seriously viable and profitable industry. With all eyes firmly fixed on this sector, the time for early adopters to cash in may have passed, but the demand for games on devices is bigger than ever and continues to rise.

In Chapter 6, we covered Flash Lite as it pertains to mobile gaming. This is one of the fastest growing and most popular areas for Flash Mobile content today; it’s second only to mobile entertainment, the subject of this chapter. Here, we’ll explore what Flash Lite has to offer this rapidly growing industry. In particular, I’ll cover some Flash Lite content types, including wallpaper and screen savers. Later in this chapter, we’ll actually design and develop some examples for each these content types using Flash Lite 1.1.

Sound is, perhaps, one of the most-powerful rich-media features found in Flash. Even considering its animation prowess, there is little doubt that Flash would not be considered one of the greatest multimedia tools out there today without its accompanying sound capabilities. In fact, Flash content without sound would be very like television without audio—a much less impressive user experience!

If Flash has a “killer app” (i.e., an application that really stands out from the competition), Flash video is most likely it. Flash video is an amazing achievement that makes it possible to create more-engaging and more-interactive user experiences for the Web.

In the previous chapters, we talked in depth about how to develop useful and exciting Flash applications that take into account mobile device limitations, such as bandwidth and memory availability. In this chapter, we will look at how you can work around some of the limitations of the Flash Lite Player, such as the inability to write files for storing persistent data like the latest news articles, and how to access native functionality of mobile devices.