Another video in my series “Developing with Flash Lite” has just been uploaded and is ready for viewing – “Animation in Flash Mobile Applications“. Animation can greatly enhance the user experience of mobile applications, and Adobe Flash, with its roots as an animation tool, has no lack of capability in this area. This episode looks at three methods of creating movement (motion tween, onEnterFrame() and the Tween Class) and how these can impact your Flash mobile application.
Just a quick tip for those Flash mobile developers out there playing with Flash Lite 3.0 and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic touch screen device. By default the 5800 (and presumably other future S60 5th Edition touch screen devices) displays a virtual keypad in the Flash Lite 3.0 standalone player. Even if you have included the ActionScript for playing the SWF at fullscreen [ fscommand2("FullScreen", true"); ], the virtual keypad will break full screen and take up screen real estate in the player, as you can see in the image below.
The way to avoid this is to add another line of ActionScript immediately before the fullScreen command -
fscommand2(“DisableKeypadCompatibilityMode”);
I personally don’t think this is an ideal solution for Flash Lite on touch screen devices. I understand the use case for where a virtual keypad (which includes the 4-way directional keys, enter key and 2 soft keys) might be required with touch-based apps, but why not have it so that you can toggle it on an off, and also have it float over the top of the full screen content rather than making it look broken?
Anyway, in the meantime, if you’re developing cool touch-based Flash Lite 3.0 apps for the Nokia devices then keep this code snippet in mind and don’t get caught out.
I'm currently the Team Lead for "Appland" at Vodafone Hutchison Australia, based in Sydney. Views on this blog are my own and not that of my employer. More about me.
