Flash Enabled: Flash Design & Development for devices

When Macromedia announced Flash 5 back in 2000 they also made a commitment to put their Flash player onto as many emerging devices as possible.

PUBLISHER: New Riders
ISBN: 0-7357-1177-1
PAGES: 534 b&w
CD: No
AUTHORS: Christian Cantrell, Mike Chambers, Branden Hall, Robert Hall, Andreas Heim, Craig Kroeger, Steve Leone, Markus Niedermeier, Bill Perry, Fred Sharples, Glenn Thomas, Phillip Torrone

 

The term device was pretty loose but the upshot of this mission is that your Flash movie doesn't just run on your desktop browser anymore; it'll run on your pocket PC, your television, games console and phone... and er, scooter, and ahem, underwater.

The man responsible for these last two pieces of blue sky research is Phillip Torrone, mobile Flash evangelist and a major contributor to the book. The most popular mobile Flash platform is of course Pocket PC, and in the first few chapters Phillip gives a thorough introduction to the delights and pitfalls of developing for it.

It's great that we have a Flash player on everything from telephones to scoreboards but the biggest myth is that you can create your Flash movies once and deploy them effortlessly across every platform. These platforms come in all shapes and sizes, each with differing processor speeds, colour depths, interface types and random browser weirdness features. Branden Hall does a good job at outlining the main differences between desktops and palmtops with an introduction to interface design for devices.

Typeface clarity is a big issue when screen size is at a premium so who better to teach about working with Flash fonts than Craig Kroeger, the man behind the seemingly ubiquitous Miniml font collection. The power of mobile processors is another big issue for developers and the harsh reality is that the tiny processors can't push pixels like your desktop can. Over the course of two chapters Glenn Thomas and Andreas Heim tackle two processor intensive projects, character animation and games development respectively.

Developing a Flash application can be a large and time consuming operation. Bill Perry tackles the issues of project workflow in the development of a typical Flash application. In his walk-through example we look at producing an event guide for a trade show. Using Generator as a backend is still an option for mobile content as the latest mobile Flash player remains Flash 5 so in his chapter Mike Chambers looks at servers side dynamic content using Generator and JGenerator.

As you might expect the Pocket PC, being the most accessible mobile platform, is covered in the most detail. Over the course of two chapters Christian Cantrell looks at the Pocket PC and how Flash can be integrated with other technologies. In his first chapter he shows how you can use Javascript and HTTP cookies to build a telephone autodialler application that uses Flash to produce DTMF tones. In his second chapter he takes a closer look at Java support on Pocket PC, and how Flash integrates with J2ME.

A few other platforms are given a chapter apiece. Flash on television is covered superbly by Glenn Thomas and Markus Niedermeier, and some hard won tips on developing for Playstation 2 are covered by Fred Sharples. Also, tucked away in the appendices, is the authoring guidelines for authoring on the Nokia 9200 Communicator Series and some useful stuff on touch screen development. Although not covered I was also delighted to see Pogo getting a name check and a photo. :)

As with all the best content, a lot of the information here is just plain common sense. That said it helps to have the hard-won best practices laid out for you. This is essentially a book of great advice by the trailblazers in the field of mobile Flash development.
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