In this final episode of the Developing with Flash Lite series, we take a look at the main points surrounding the next stage of the Flash mobile platform – Flash Player 10.1. Find out what it all means for Flash developers creating rich mobile applications from 2010 and beyond.
I say this in the video, but wanted to also call it out here – a special thanks goes to Alan Tam and Mark Doherty at Adobe for their help in putting this video series together. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve had some great feedback from the community to say that it’s been worthwhile, which of course the main reason for doing it! Thanks everyone for watching, and maybe we’ll throw together some more videos in 2010.
Nokia have begun to open up the API Bridge used by WRT widgets to Flash Lite developers, giving them native ActionScript classes to access hardware APIs for the camera, sound recording, and file upload. In this episode we dive into a demo of how to access the camera using ActionScript and Nokia’s API Bridge.
The two APIs that are available to Flash Lite developers (the rest apply to Web Runtime widgets) are:
File Upload: This function allows for the upload of a file to a web server using a multipart/form-data POST request.
New File Service: This function allows Flash Lite applications to embed native applications in order to capture images, videos, and audio.
You’re probably thinking, “Isn’t this what KuneriLite has been doing all this time?”, and the answer would be – basically yes. I’m hoping to get some more info around this solution and post some more feedback shortly, but from looking at it right now and not having tested it out yet, I’d say it’s not a bad way to go for ActionScript guys who don’t want to get into using plug-ins, etc. That being said, I don’t know the road-map for how many more features APIBridge might include in the future. Starting with these two, they have a fair way to go before they match the features that Kuneri offer. But going on what they’ve done with Platform Services (and this is basically following in a very similar model to that solution), Nokia will be following this initial launch up with more features in the future.
A new title has just been added to the “Developing with Flash Lite” video series – “Persisting Data using Mobile Shared Objects“. Keeping data saved on a mobile device can greatly enhance the usability and workflow of an application. With Flash Lite, we can use Shared Objects to achieve this and persist data on the device for use in future sessions. In this episode we look at implementing Shard Objects into your Flash Lite mobile application.
Automated Test Scripts in Device Central CS4 allow developers to run programtic interaction tests for their content across single or multiple device profiles. In this episode we take a look at creating, recording and playing back Test Scripts, plus some of the available API’s you have at your disposal.
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.
