Flash Lite 2 Update (preview) for Flash Professional 8

Want to get into Flash for Mobile? Now is the time. The Flash Lite 2 Update will update your mobile autohoring tools within the Flash IDE to support all the nice features of FlashLite 2 like AS2/Flash 7 commands, Shared Objects, drawing API and more.

The past week several blogs mentioned that the standalone Flash Lite 2 Player was available for purchase from the Macromedia Store. Unfortunately it's only available for Nokia phones at the moment, but we are sure that support for SonyEricsson and others are in the pipe as well. If you have one of the supported Nokia phones, make sure you go to the Labs site now for Macromedia "are providing access to a free download of Flash Lite 2 for a select set of mobile phones". Not that it's expensive in the first place ($10), but for now it's completely free.

The files published on the Macromedia Labs site today are "preview" versions of the Mobile Emulator and profiles for it. We are not so sure this "preview"-thing is going to do Macromedia any good this time around. With the Flex Alpha, it really was a great experience. A great insight into AS3 and the improvements we can expect all in a fairly stable environment and player.

With the Mobile Emulator this is different. We can't get it to work properly. We tried to make a small slideshow application but got nothing but trouble. We added two button components and an image to the stage and the emulator started showing memory-related errors. Our test image is a 60Kb JPEG image that is 245Kb when uncompressed. This is well below the 1024Kb limit on the N90. Unless the button component gobbles the remaining 760Kb, there's a bug here somewhere. Maybe we were just unlucky while testing or maybe we are judging "preview software" too hard? Anyway: we really look forward to using proper ActionScript and Flash 7 commands for our mobile apps rather than the rather limited Flash 4/5/6 commands with Flash 4 style scripting.

Update: Marco Casario tells in a blogpost that we should not use the Flash components in Flash Lite 2 applications. Maybe it would be wise of Adobe/Macromedia to add a check in the emulator that will throw a warning if any of the components are used? It isn't exactly obvious that one should not use them if Flash 7 compatability is claimed and to be honest - it's only a button component. How can that possibly be too much? Also others finding snags out there, so this is definetly Alpha software
Click to download the Flash Lite 2 Update to Flash Professional 8

 

 

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